


Fox Country, Episode One

by evil_whimsey



Series: Fox Country [1]
Category: Blackbird (Ouran AU)
Genre: Also there's a fox, Arai is Something Else, Mori is The Hermit, Multi, and it's massive, magical forest au, yes I wrote an AU of my AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:07:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 39,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5532026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blackbird AU.  In which Mori is a fugitive from his homeland; a hermit who discovers a derelict cottage, in a forest where ghosts and mysteries and ancient promises are hidden.</p><p>[Update:  Oh hey I just remembered I've got a <a href="https://soundcloud.com/transient-peak/sets/fox-country-soundtrack">soundtrack in progress for this thing,</a> over on Soundcloud.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This universe was actually the precursor to [The Waterworld Stories](http://archiveofourown.org/series/367043), and has gone unposted for a really long time, because it's huge and sprawling and frankly terrifying to deal with.
> 
> The Prologue below was written by my bestest pal [PandoraCulpa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/PandoraCulpa), back in (jesus christ) November of 2008, in the course of one of our larky writing-prompt games. She kicked this beginning at me, and at the time of this posting (December, 2015), I'm up to 300-thousand-something words of this universe.
> 
> Best. Writing Prompt. Ever.

 

_Prologue_

_by PandoraCulpa_

 

_One morning, Mori awakes to the belling of hounds._

 

_They are far distant from his home, but if he strains his ears he can just make out the crash of their bodies through the dense undergrowth of the mountain. None of his neighbors keep dogs, and his curiosity is piqued as to who might be hunting in such treacherous country._

 

_The noise fades eventually, and he goes about his morning tasks as usual. Breakfast, then exercise- with the shinai, today- and when that is done he moves out to the garden behind his house to turn the soil and prepare it for planting._

 

_The physical labor of farming forms its own kata, and hours fly past as he digs and repairs the small fence around the beds. It is well past noon when he finally pauses, wiping sweat from his eyes, and realizes he is hungry. Setting the hoe aside, he lifts his arms to the sky, stretching out the sore muscles of his back and shoulders, and it is then that he hears the baying of the dogs again._

 

_The sound is upwind from him, and it swells and fades as it floats on the breeze. But as he walks to his porch, he thinks it is becoming louder. Heading this way, perhaps. He prepares a quick bowl of rice and vegetables, and sits on the porch as he eats, listening to the excited cries of the hounds._

 

_His house sits in a small clearing, dappled with the shade from the surrounding trees. Mori has never bothered to clear the undergrowth at the treeline, taking only as much space from the forest as he needs. He has always loved the harmony of nature, it is why he chooses to live so far from the town, and the more he listens to the voices of the dogs rising over the stillness of the afternoon, the more it bothers him. Their hunt has no place here._

 

_The bushes and weeds across from the porch suddenly shiver violently, and a small, sleek shape tumbles into the cool shade of the clearing. At first Mori thinks it's one of the dogs, separated from the pack, but when it raises its head, its look of wide-eyed terror tells a different story. This is the prey._

 

_The fox limps forward, favoring a front paw that it holds awkwardly before it. It seems taken aback by the abrupt end to the brush and undergrowth that had been hiding it. Tongue lolling and flecked with foam, it hobbles a few more steps, ears pricked and black nose testing the air. On the porch, Mori holds himself utterly still, afraid to startle the poor beast._

 

_The hounds sing out, closer than before, and the little fox flinches, eyes darting here and there across the yard as though seeking out some place to hide. It's exhausted, Mori realizes, at the end of its endurance and injured besides, and its instincts are telling it to go to ground for safety. Only who knows where it dens, or how far away. It must have been pursued far from its territory and all the safe places it knows. He feels a sharp stab of sympathy for the poor thing, lost and hurt and fearing for its life._

 

_On impulse, he moves slowly, carefully, away from his door, making a clear path into the darkened interior. His movement catches the fox's eye, and for a moment he's sure it's going to run. Every line in its lean body is tense, long brush of a tail hanging low to the ground- but a sharp yelp in the woods close by changes its mind. Ears back, it limps and hops across the yard, dark eyes watching Mori with a fearful, pleading expression, and something inside his heart melts at that look._

 

_It pauses again on the steps, but now even Mori can hear the rush of the hounds through the leaves and bracken, and with a look of terrified resignation the fox heaves itself forward. It scuttles through the doorway with the greatest speed it can manage, and once it's inside Mori slides the door closed and picks up his bowl once again._

 

_No sooner has he done so than several dogs burst into the clearing, their deep voices calling in a mournful, chilling choir. A few of them cast around, nose to the ground, along the edges of the clearing, but the largest- clearly the pack leader- moves directly toward the porch. Its eyes are remarkably like the fox's; dark and knowing, although without all the hidden places. How unusual, Mori thinks incongruously, that one can tell a domesticated beast from a wild one merely by the depth in its eyes._

 

_The dog doesn't appear prepared to stop, and Mori puts aside his bowl and stands. There is a walking staff which he keeps beside the door, and he picks it up, wielding it like his shinai as he faces the pack leader. He does not want to fight the dog for doing as it was trained, but he is adamantly unwilling to allow it any closer to the fox._

 

_The dog seems to sense this; it pauses, hackles raised but silent. It paces back and forth before the house, while a few of its companions raise loud complaints at the suspension of the hunt._

 

_Not long after, still engaged in his standoff with the pack, more sounds reach Mori's ears. Trampling, much slower than the dogs' approach, and presently a man strides into the clearing. He is no one Mori has ever seen before, not a neighbor nor anyone from town. Dressed in russet and brown, with ginger hair to match, the stranger glances over the scene with his odd, pale eyes before greeting Mori with a crooked grin. "Have you seen a fox?" he inquires._

 

_"I have not," Mori tells him, and gestures with his staff at the pack. "Please take your dogs away."_

 

_Ignoring the request, the man walks up to the base of the steps. Resting a thin hand on his hip, he cocks his head. "My dogs seem to think that it came by here. Are you sure you haven't see it?"_

 

_"I'm sure," he says, wondering why he has taken such an instant dislike to the stranger. "I've been here for almost an hour, and I've seen nothing at all."_

 

_"Hmm." A delicate finger taps his lips, as the man considers this. As though he has no intention of leaving, and Mori feels anger swelling his chest._

 

_"There is no fox here," he repeats, and lowers the staff ever so slightly into a more aggressive posture. "This is my home, and my land, and I would like you to take your dogs away. Please," he adds, but his voice indicates this is not a request._

 

_The man gives him a shrewd look. "Hmm," he says again, but with a sharp whistle he calls the dogs to his side and begins retreating from the clearing. At the edge of the woods, he turns back, a sharp kind of smile on his face that shows more teeth than Mori thinks is necessary._

 

_"You should watch out for foxes," he advises. "Even if you didn't see it, I know it came this way. And they are trouble, oh yes. Especially this one. He's been a bother to me and mine for quite some time. I'd save you that trouble..."_

 

_"There is no trouble. There is no fox."_

 

_The man smiles even broader. "As you will." And then he and his dogs are gone._

 

 

_**********_

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

1.

Mori waited, staff in hand, until the last of the dog pack retreated, snuffling and muttering into the underbrush. He waited until the clearing around his cottage was still and hushed once more. Until the hush was broken by the chirp of a single bird, perched on the high limb of a pine, answered by one of its fellows a short distance off, and then the surrounding woods gradually resumed the regular song of trills and tweets, and the whisper of tree tops in the breeze.

With all the calm of a man with no need to rush, and nothing to hide, Mori finally returned to his seat on the top step of his porch, and finished his lunch in leisurely bites, watching and listening, and fixing every detail of that stranger's dress, his bearing, his voice, into memory. Having never seen the man before, there was a logical chance they might never cross paths again. But some instinct told Mori it would be an exceptional stroke of luck, if they didn't.

He had encountered odder individuals in the time since he'd come to this remote property, but none had made him quite so wary, or so tense and watchful after the fact, as that ginger-haired man and his sharp-edged smile. Like many things that came out of the darkness of the wild woods, that man was something to be careful of. And since Mori had no idea of the man's measure--his character, intentions, or his capabilities--he couldn't trust that the appearance of normal solitude around him was all it seemed.

After a length of time, when his bowl was empty, and the noontime peace began edging into a lazy afternoon drone, unbroken by any further disturbance, Mori rose and just as he did a dozen or more times a day, casually slid his front door open. He was greeted by quiet, and the same cool shadows he'd left earlier. Nothing else.

He walked to the small kitchen and rinsed his bowl, keeping his ears tuned for any sound from his new guest. But none came to him. He set his bowl aside to dry, but then after a moment's consideration, took it back and filled it with water instead. He was fully aware the chances a frightened wild creature would accept anything from him were nil, but pity and a basic, deeply ingrained hospitality, compelled him to try anyway.

Though of course he'd have to find the fox, first.

A glance at his sparsely furnished front room revealed no sign of it; between the low table, the wood stove in the corner, and the narrow alcove with its faded hanging scroll, there was simply nowhere for it to hide. But then Mori spotted a small dead leaf, brown and curled, on the clean expanse of wooden floor, and a fragment of a broken twig further along and drawing closer, he could make out tiny clumps of scattered dirt, in a fine trail leading back toward the only other rooms in the cottage: the bath, and his bedroom.

A smear of dirt, most likely a paw print, just past the door to the bath, suggested the fox had bypassed that room, and Mori slowed his cautious tread even further at the last doorway. Cornered animals could be dangerous, and a bite from one could mean a two-hour walk down to the village for medical aid, for him. But mainly he was concerned the fox might injure itself in a panicked attempt to escape. With that in mind, he edged into his bedroom, one slow step at a time.

Step and pause. Step and pause. On the third step there came a brief, soft scuffing off by the far wall, where an altar of old dark wood sat atop a low, cloth-draped table, and Mori froze where he stood.

The sound didn't repeat, but looking closely, Mori saw the tiny tuft of cottony white fur, shed against the altar cloth in passing, and that told him all he needed to know.

Slowly he bent down, and placed the bowl of water on the floor, and eyed the distance from the altar table, to his small wooden bookcase, against the wall behind his bed. There was no telling how long it would take for the fox to emerge, and he wouldn't mind something to occupy himself with until then. But it was too close. Too risky, he judged, before silently rising to his feet and retreating as carefully as he'd come in.

He spent the majority of the afternoon out on his porch, shaded from the high bright sun, watching the shifting shapes of the occasional cloud above the treetops, and chipping in a half-distracted fashion, at a wooden bowl he'd been carving. He usually saved his whittling--bowls, cups, and chopsticks, mostly--for evenings, and when the weather forestalled any work outside. But he hoped that, given space and quiet, the fox would find its own way out of the house, and in the meantime he had best stay out of the way and make as little noise as possible.

When the sun finally waned, starting its slow glide downward behind the western hills, Mori thought perhaps he should go and check on the fox. He'd detected no sign at all of its presence since he'd left the water bowl, and was starting to worry it might've been in far worse shape than he'd first expected. It would make for a poor job of aid indeed, if the creature died behind his altar, due to his inattention. His religious education hadn't specified anything about wild animals expiring under altars, but he was sure it involved some class of taboo, leading to probably a lifetime of terrible bad luck, not to mention the guilt.

So he crept back toward the bedroom, where the walls showed a faint dusky pink from the sunset through the windows, and the corners were already in disappearing into shadows. He went as far as the water bowl on the floor, and stopped, listening for any reaction to his presence. All he heard at first was the faint, intermittent chirp of a cricket outside one of the windows. But then he slowed his breathing, and strained his ears....and there. So soft he could be imagining it; the broken whisper of shallow breaths.

Holding his own breath, Mori slid his foot leftwards, shifting his weight, and praying the beams of the floor wouldn't creak and give him away. Another sideways slip, slow and soundless, and he could see both sides of the altar table, the cloth hanging straight and still....

And the curve of a small muzzle, from the white blaze to the rounded black nose, resting on the floor. There, under the altar cloth, the fox was sound asleep.

Mori moved in, inch by inch as close as he dared, until he could see where one limp, furry ear poked out from the hem of the cloth, above one closed eye. For no reason he could understand, the sight tugged a tiny smile out of him.

This close, he could definitely make out the muted whistle of indrawn breaths, and it eased his most immediate worries. But it left him puzzled too; he'd never heard of a wild animal sleeping in a human habitat, when escape was an option. And when it wasn't, he knew it took more than a mere few hours for even a domesticated animal to settle enough to sleep in a strange place.

It was a curious mystery, and it reinforced Mori's vague persistent sense that all might not be as it seemed, here. It wasn't any alarm or suspicion he felt--not in the presence of the fox, anyway; the man who'd pursued it to his front steps was another matter. It was more a kind of expectation, really. That what had started out as a break in his everyday routine, might actually prove to have some more significant, longer lasting impact. How it might turn out, or what might come of it, he had no inkling at all. But even later in the evening, when he was slipping into his bedroom a third time, to leave a plate of rice and leftover fish from his dinner, and silently retrieve the top quilt off his futon, Mori wasn't altogether surprised to see that the fox still hadn't stirred from hiding.

**

In the deep stillness of midnight, Mori rolled over and stretched his legs, his mind fogged with sleep and the warmth of his quilt, cocooned around him. He wasn't awake so much as momentarily, distantly aware. Of the stiffness in his shoulder and hip, pressed to the floor. Of the total envelopment of quiet, with no breeze outside, no animal or insect sounds. Of the stripe of moonlight, spilling through the open front door, and silhouetting the small irregular shape at the threshold.

_Good luck_ , he might have mumbled to the fox, or maybe he only thought it. The last thing he saw was the silver-black outline of a snout and a pair of pointed ears, and then the warm foggy darkness rose up and claimed him again.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

 

It took most of a morning's work to exercise the kinks out of his back, during which time Mori decided that the next creature who took refuge in his bedroom overnight would have to put up with sharing it. A night on a hard wooden floor was easy enough when he was ten, but it wasn't something he cared to repeat anymore.

He'd been surprised, upon waking and hobbling into his bedroom, to find that the fox had actually drank most of the water in the bowl, and eaten every crumb of food he'd left. Surprised but reassured, knowing that the fox was well enough to eat, and make its way back out to freedom. Hopefully it would find its home safely, and have no further run-ins with hounds, or their dubious owners. 

And thus, with the satisfaction of having completed a good and useful deed, Mori turned his attention back to his daily routine. Tilling in the garden, pruning out in the pear orchard. Splitting a stack of firewood, for the kitchen, the bath, and the front room stove. Springtime had been exceptionally mild so far this year, but there were bound to be a few cold snaps over the next few months, and he'd learned there was really no such thing as having too much firewood cut.

At noontime, he cleaned himself off and took his usual break for lunch out on the porch. He brought out a tray with rice and eggs and pickled vegetables, and a small pot of green tea, and nearly dropped all of it when he spotted the fox at the bottom of the steps, looking up at him.

_"...He's been a bother to me and mine, for quite some time."_ That stranger's words echoed back to Mori, as he stood balancing his tray and watching the fox, who sat on its haunches, dirty matted tail tucked around its feet with a tattered sort of dignity, watching him back.

Perhaps he shouldn't simply dismiss the opinion of a person, solely on the grounds that he'd disliked them on sight. But Mori wasn't convinced that what constituted a bother for that man, would necessarily apply to him too. He'd been taught growing up, that most people earned the trouble they got, and all too often they failed to make the connection between their deeds and the consequences.

And of course, there were those people who invented nuisances, as an excuse to impose their will. The man who'd intruded on his property with his hounds rather struck Mori as that sort. And maybe it was arrogant of him to assume the fox would not trouble him as the stranger had suggested, merely because he'd done nothing to merit trouble so far. 

But then he'd always been pragmatic. And in this case, his pragmatism told him to wait and judge trouble when he saw trouble.

"Hello. Did you forget something?" he asked. Not that he expected an answer; he was more curious to see whether the fox would be startled into fleeing, if he spoke to it.

The fox didn't reply, of course, but neither did it run, or even flinch. It perked an ear at him and tilted its head slightly, just as though it were every bit as curious as Mori was, to see what might happen next.

It was the closest he'd ever been to a fox, and the first time he could recall matching gazes with one. Its eyes, he noted, were the color of tarnished brass, but bright and alert in a way they hadn't been yesterday morning. And though Mori knew it was foolish to attribute human expression to any animal, he couldn't help reading a certain earnestness in the creature's face, which he never would've associated with its species. 

Intelligence, yes. Mischievousness, cunning; these were the usual attributes he'd heard about. He had to wonder though, if they were all delivered by people who'd looked as closely as he was looking now.

Ever so slightly, the fox shifted itself, and Mori saw its eyes drop and fix on the tray he held. Ah, he thought, glancing down at his rice and eggs, and pickled vegetables. That explained the return visit.

"You should know, I'm not much of a cook." He knelt down slowly, and set his tray on the porch. "And I really shouldn't feed you." The fox kept its eyes on the food, lifted its muzzle and sniffed at the air, and Mori smiled wryly to himself. It was true, though. He shouldn't encourage the fox to let down its guard, and possibly forgo its healthy and entirely justified fear of people. The fox belonged in the forest, among others of its kind, foraging for food it was accustomed to.

Maybe he was too susceptible to the myths and folktales he'd heard growing up. In those stories, Kitsune could be a trickster, or a bringer of good fortune; it always seemed to depend on how the people in the story treated it. Most spirits and supernatural entities were either resolutely good, or resolutely bad. But involvement with the fox--according to the myths, at least--could turn out either way. 

Maybe there was some small, not-altogether-mature part of Mori that still resented that stranger's intrusion, and his prediction, and wanted to prove the man wrong.

Or maybe, he thought, fetching a bowl of water and a clean plate from his kitchen, it was simple recognition that impelled him to share with the fox. There was once a time when he himself had fled persecution and the threat of capture. And if it hadn't been for someone's interference--someone who by all rights should have wanted nothing to do with him--Mori wouldn't be alive now.

**

It wasn't strictly true, what he'd told that stranger. He held no actual legal title to the cottage he lived in, and the land he tilled and tended. No one did, as far as he could discover. He'd asked in the village, consulted land and tax records, talked to the old-timers and the town fathers. By all accounts, the cottage had been empty and the property untouched for somewhere between fifty and sixty-three years (depending on who he'd asked).

No one claimed it. No one even wanted it, which Mori had found somewhat perplexing, until a few of the older folk filled him in on the stories and rumors regarding the place. After a lot of patient listening to a handful of the village's elderly, he was able to filter out certain details.

It was an unlucky place, they told him. Prone to unexplained floods and droughts. It edged on parts of the forest no one would venture into, and some hinted that it attracted strange sights and dangerous spirits.

They told him how, every five or ten years, some bold villager or tourist would declare all those stories superstitious nonsense, and visit the place for themselves. Many came back claiming they'd seen nothing out of the ordinary, but for various reasons declared the place unsuitable for living or farming. The ground was too rocky, the drainage was poor. The cottage was drafty, the roof leaked all over, the foundation beams were rotted. Too many mosquitoes, or grasshoppers, or crows, or snakes, or rodents. Wild boars had taken over the orchard. The well water smelled like a swamp.

Too much work, they said. And nothing good would grow there anyway. On those points, everyone seemed unanimous.

Besides the criticisms, the visitors were frequently injured on their surveys. They came home with turned ankles, splinters, poison ivy, bee stings. Burns from campfires (no one ever seemed interested in sleeping in the cottage, but camped in the clearing instead), sunstroke, and in one party's case, severe frostbite from a freak ice storm in April.

Mori had spent almost a month on the property, before coming to the village to inquire about it. He'd seen no boars or snakes or mosquitoes, and while he did find a few drafts and roof leaks, the cottage foundation looked sound, so far as he could tell. He had run across other things, though.

Did anyone mention the place being haunted, he'd asked one of the old-timers. And the man, a retired blacksmith in his seventies, gave Mori an odd, sidelong look.  
"You seem like a smart, steady young fellow," he'd said. "Not the sort to go around collecting ghost stories."

Mori shrugged. "When people say a place is unlucky, you usually hear about ghosts, too."  
"From folks out to get attention, maybe," the man said. "When a person's seen something for real, they don't often mention it. 'Less their family and neighbors decide they're crazy. They don't want the attention one bit."

"I heard people have seen things up there. But nobody's said what."

"If it's tales about spirits and curses you want, I'd suggest you go ask around the shrine. The head priest over there--well, the last head, I guess he passed on two summers back. He took some trips up to the property. Some said he was looking to do an exorcism of the whole place. Dunno if it's true or not. One of the other monks might tell you for certain."

But Mori didn't need to ask at the shrine. He knew what he'd already seen, and the old man was right. When a person had a genuine head-on encounter with the supernatural world, they tended to keep quiet about it, if they were smart. And there was doubtless enough gossip going around about him as it was; the tall young traveler, wandering into the village to ask about a property no one wanted, and where most wouldn't venture. He didn't want to give people any more reason to talk. 

He hadn't told anyone how long he'd been there already. How he'd already cleaned up the cottage, patched most of the leaks in the roof, scoured the kitchen chimney, or laboriously dug out a blockage in the stream that watered the orchards. 

He also didn't mention how, when he'd first arrived on the property, wandering into the clearing where the cottage stood, disoriented and two days lost, the very air in the place had felt thick and ominous, just as though he were still in the darkest, closest part of the woods, where no birds sang, nothing moved, and the forest canopy blocked all but a memory of sunlight.

He knew exactly why people hadn't liked the property; he'd felt it himself, right away. The muggy, prickly atmosphere. The persistent feeling of claustrophobic gloom, out in the midst of a sunny clearing. The place had felt like something bad waiting to happen, and Mori's nerves had jangled with the wrongness. If he hadn't been in need of water and a break to get his bearings, he might have turned right back around and retreated to the woods again. 

But then he'd tripped, fallen and gashed his arm open on a big sharp rock that he would swear hadn't been there before. The blood soaked his sleeve, soaked the ground, and through the encroaching dizziness, he'd known that leaving was out of the question.

He mentioned none of this to the people he met in the village. Not on his first visit, or any subsequent. With any luck, the people there would take as little notice of him as possible, wouldn't think of him or talk about him, and most particularly wouldn't mention him to other visitors. He had gone a long way to escape trouble, traveling half the country before seeking a place to settle down. Now he could only hope that trouble wouldn't catch up to him here.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

 

For the next five days, the fox arrived punctually at lunchtime, sitting in the same spot at the foot of the cottage steps. After a brief one-sided chat, Mori would set food and water on the bottom step, and after he retreated to the opposite side of the porch and started on his own lunch, the fox would venture forward to eat, keeping an eye and an ear on Mori all the while.

It always emptied the plate in careful, neat bites, and then drank from the water bowl. When it was done, it would sit and watch Mori eat, or turn and observe the clearing awhile, ears swiveling and nose tilted to the breeze. After an indeterminate amount of time, it would stand and shake out its coat a little, blink once or twice back at Mori, and then walk or trot away.

The first couple of days, Mori noticed it still had that worrisome limp from its narrow escape from the hounds. He had tried to get close enough for a look at the foot it favored, but the fox eyed him warily, backing away in direct proportion to his advance, and since the last thing he wanted was to threaten the fox, he really had no choice but to leave it be. At least there were no signs of bleeding or breakage, that he could tell, and all he could hope was that the injury was healing on its own.

He had no idea where the fox stayed when it wasn't visiting his porch. It never seemed to leave toward the same direction twice, and Mori never saw it except at noontime, though he kept a careful eye out wherever he went on the property. Eventually it dawned on him, that those hounds may well have driven it out of its previous home, which must have been a considerable distance off, since Mori had never seen nor heard any hounds previously, in all the exploring he'd done in the region.

On the fourth day, Mori had to lay down a cardinal rule of his house to the fox.

"I appreciate your gift. I'm honored. But I'm afraid I can't cook that."

The fox, standing at the bottom of the steps with a mouthful of something brown and furry, blinked at him.

"I don't hunt, or trap," Mori explained, trying to sound diplomatic instead of horrified, and to not look too closely at whatever the fox had caught. "I wouldn't even know how to clean it."

All he got from the fox was a dark gold stare. And then the creature in its mouth wriggled and let out a tiny, thin shriek.

"Oh God it's still alive." Mori surrendered all diplomacy and covered his eyes. "Please let it go."

Apparently put out with either Mori's ingratitude or his squeamishness, the fox made an impatient-sounding huff, and deposited its prize--a stunned and bedraggled vole--on the bottom of the steps. The poor huddled thing was frozen with terror, but otherwise it seemed miraculously uninjured.

"I'm sorry." Whether he was apologizing to the vole or the fox, Mori didn't even know. "I think I have some dried beef in the pantry, if you want."

The fox prodded at the vole with one paw and with another high squeak, the vole curled itself into a furry damp ball, which the fox sniffed momentarily, and then nosed off the step. The moment it hit the ground, the vole unfolded itself and scrambled off and around the side of the house, in a blur of fur, feet, and whiskers.

Mori's appetite was a while in returning after that, but the fox took to the hunk of dried beef with serious determination, capturing it between its forepaws and gnawing away for nearly half an hour, until not a shred was left. Then it sniffed its way up the steps to the top of the porch, in case there was any more it had missed.

"I do appreciate the thought," Mori said, looking on in bemusement as the fox snuffled toward him. "If you found some truffles, I wouldn't turn that down."  
After a few moments, the fox gave up its quest for more dried beef and sat back on its haunches, hardly more than an arm's length away, with its head cocked.

"Or chestnuts. I haven't had those in awhile."

The fox yawned wide and licked its chops, and Mori scooped some of his rice onto a small side dish, and slid it toward the fox.  
"That vole is very thankful you let it go. And I am too."

 

**

If it hadn't been for the lady haunting the well, Mori might not have survived his first few days on the property. Eventually either infection or starvation would've taken him; it was a tossup at the time. He'd been too weak and woozy from blood loss to even consider navigating the forest again, and while the first-aid kit he'd kept in his pack was respectable, his food supply was not. After a sober internal debate, he used the last of his water cleaning the wound on his arm before bandaging it, and that was when his situation went critical.

In those hours before the first nightfall, between vertiginous weak spells, he explored the property for a potable water supply, and for anything that might be even remotely edible. He had located the well by the rank, decaying odor wafting out of it (no doubt the same smell all those past explorers had complained of), and gave it a wide berth.

Back then, the cottage was hemmed in by masses of dead underbrush and chest-high weeds, all tangled with thorned vines and briars. At a glance, one might have thought the wild thicket had grown out of the structure itself, and that the grim weather-beaten front porch was an entrance into the heart of it.

He skirted the overgrown barrier for several meters, only to find that it merged into the woods behind the house, without a break. Since he didn't care to collect any more bleeding wounds, and was quickly running out of both daylight and the wherewithal to keep moving, he decided to search elsewhere.

 

It was just like fasting, he tried to tell himself, crouching at the base of an orchard tree with his head between his knees, keeping his eyes shut against the sickening whirl of the ground. He was certainly no stranger to hunger and thirst; in the year and a half he'd been wandering, he'd become extremely well-versed in both. He'd lost count ages ago, of how many nights he'd bedded down with his stomach hollow and aching, in haylofts and open fields, dark alleyways and city parks. And every time, he'd told himself that same thing.

Although starving for a night on a hard stone park bench was nothing like abstaining for a temple ritual. It wasn't a choice for one thing, and going hungry in a community of people was a far cry from being homeless, friendless, penniless, and hungry.

Though that was nowhere near as bad as where he was now, he reflected. At least on a farm or in a town, he could have begged for help. Out here, at the base of a twisted tree, in the midst of endless wilderness, with a throbbing wound still seeping under blood-soaked bandages, and early twilight falling fast, Mori had no one but himself.


	5. Chapter 5

He had no recollection of fainting, or any idea how long he was out for. The last things he remembered were staggering back toward the clearing, to where he'd left his pack, and fumbling a lot of rocks and sticks into a pile, with the intention of making a campfire. How he'd ended up back at the well, he had absolutely no idea, but he was distinctly grateful he hadn't fallen in, or struck his head on the stones, on the way down.

The first thing he noticed when he finally came to, was that it was cold. The seeping, clammy sort of cold reminiscent of heavy ocean fog or a stone floor on a damp autumn night. Not a biting cold, but a cold that rolled into the bones, settling deep and slowly sapping the body's warmth. 

Mori hadn't felt this particular chill in a long time. And yet in some distant back corner of his mind, he must have been expecting it all day. Given the unease that had come over him, when he first hiked onto the property. Given the state of the house, and its surroundings. Maybe the rock he'd cut himself on had been in plain sight all along. But owing to whatever was wrong with this place, he'd been prevented from seeing it. It was not a strange thought at all.

The second thing he noticed, with the cold (and its implications) sharpening his wits for him, was that it wasn't so dark as it had been, when he'd been scrabbling one-handed to lay a fire. In fact, he thought, blinking and cautiously pushing himself to sit upright, it was growing steadily less dark by the moment.

It's coming, he thought, feeling his heart kick up against his breastbone, and his flesh prickling under his clothes. There were shadows now, quivering and flickering over the ground, and the stone sides of the well, and Mori watched. He stayed absolutely as still as possible, and watched for the first hint of what the light would become.

"....if it's a yellow light, like a candle, that's okay," he'd once explained, a long long time ago. "If it's yellow, it's something safe. But if the light is black, you have to get away. Black light means something bad."

"You mean ultraviolet light?" his cousin had asked. Mori's cousin had a tutor, who taught him science and foreign languages, and lots of other things Mori didn't learn in the temple.  
"I don't know. It's like the light just stops. Like all the shadows are packed into one place. But you can see. And if you ever see that, you have to run."

He wondered if running would save him, here. He could run into the forest, trip over another rock or a tree root and break his neck. He could run panicked into the thicket, and end up blinded. He could run for his pack, for the last pinch of salt he'd saved, but there was no way that could be enough....

No. He couldn't panic. After all that wandering, and all he'd endured. After everything he'd given up. He was not going to simply die of fright.

He forced himself to breathe the cold, clammy air, and to ignore the growing stench from the well. It didn't have to involve him. Plenty of ghosts kept entirely to their own business. If he didn't draw attention to himself, there was every chance this one might never even notice....

The light flickered brighter, coalescing into a shape near his left side, and the voice of Mori's thoughts broke like a snapped string, right in the middle.

Blue. It was a blue light, this time. Which meant....

"...it means something sad. It means they lost something, or they were lost, when they died."

One moment it was a blur of light, and the next a fully-detailed form dressed in long flowing layers, with sleeves that trailed to the ground. The ghost was a woman, wearing kimono in a style Mori had only seen in old, old drawings and costumes for historic festivals. Her hair was unbound, hanging straight and impossibly long down her back, and she hid her face behind a painted paper fan.

The fan was decorated with pear blossoms, artfully scattered across the creases, to match the blossoms tumbling along the hem of her outer robe. That was probably significant, in some way he would just as probably never understand. 

But the reason for the fan, Mori quickly realized, the reason she covered her face, was because she knew he was there. It had been a custom of modesty among ladies of the nobility, a very long time ago, to hide their faces in the presence of men. And it was weird, Mori thought, the way history lessons came back to you sometimes....

"I beg your pardon for intruding," he said, since it never hurt to be polite with ghosts. He bowed his head, partly out of respect, and partly because the fitful shifting light the ghost emitted caused a humming vibration in the backs of his eyeballs and his sinuses, which would get painful if he looked too long. It was always that way with ghosts, though he'd never figured out why.

"If you don't want me here, I'll go away. I didn't mean to disturb you."  
He pushed himself up to his knees, and cautiously stood upright, praying his legs wouldn't buckle beneath him. They felt weak and trembly, and Mori considered using the side of the well for balance, but decided against it. Who knew if those stones would even hold him.

The woman stayed motionless as he climbed up, but then just as he was taking his first step backward, she turned and the light pulsed brighter for a moment. Mori glanced up, and saw she was pointing; with her hand hidden demurely in her long layered sleeve, she was directing his attention to the well.

Damn. He'd really been hoping she wouldn't do that. 

Obviously there was something down the well that needed dealing with, and going by the noisome odor wafting out aggressively now, he had an unhappy suspicion about what it might be. He sighed inwardly.

"I'll help you, if I can," he offered, knowing he wouldn't get a moment's peace in this clearing until the ghost was appeased, and leaving the area was hardly an option. "But I got hurt earlier." He raised his arm, to indicate the dark-stained bandages. "I don't know if I'll be any use. But I'll try."

The woman flickered and glowed, but otherwise didn't move, and Mori looked away, to spare his eyes, and inspect the condition of the windlass.

It was chain leading down to the well-bucket, instead of rope, which was probably fortunate. It was hard to see, between the ever-moving shadows and guttering blue glow, so he moved in and trailed his fingers over the links, feeling for rust.

There was a crumbly coating to the cold iron, but the links weren't fused--at least not this high up--so Mori moved to the handle of the windlass, grasped it, and planted his feet.

The first several turns were stiff, and Mori was definitely lacking his usual strength. By the time the bucket crested the side of the well, he was out of breath, sweating despite the chill, and his head was starting to spin again.

"Sorry," he gasped, leaning against the windlass. "I just need a moment." The ghost stood by, with all the implacable patience of the restless dead.

Once he'd caught his breath, Mori lifted out the water bucket, and peered in. As far as he could make out, the water was startlingly clear. Given the smell, he'd expected a bucket full of soggy leaf litter, rotted algae scum, or worse. Mostly he'd expected worse. But it was just water. 

And the sight of it, wet and glittering in the ghost-light, awakened his thirst with a vengeance. All at once, his throat felt dried to cracking; every cell in his body itched for a drink. There for a moment, it took everything he had not to tip the bucket straight into his open mouth.

But that would be his death sentence, for sure. Clean as it may look, this water had to be tainted somehow. He'd bet his last pinch of salt on it.

So he swallowed down the scratchy knot in his throat, and looked to the ghost for a hint about what he should do next.

She was facing him. Painted fan still hiding her face, and pointing to the water bucket, with her free hand. But what about it? Had she died wanting water? Was she warning him away from it?

"I'm sorry, I don't understand."

Slowly, the pointing hand lowered, stilling on a level with the bottom of the bucket. Oh. 

Mori rested the bucket on the top of the well wall, and gingerly brought his injured arm around to keep it balanced, before reaching with his good hand, into the icy water. Submerging his knuckles, his wrist; doing his best to ignore the thirst clawing at his insides, and the aching fuss kicking up in his wound, stretching his fingers to the bottom of the bucket, feeling the ridged grain of the wood, slightly spongy, and then....something that wasn't wood. Something flat, irregular. He had to work a bit to get a grasp on it.

"This is what you wanted?" Mori held out the hair comb, dripping and gleaming in his fingers. It was some kind of silvery metal, two thin prongs with delicate scrolling and enamel-inlay at the top. Pear blossoms, no surprise there. 

Somehow Mori was sure the ghost wouldn't accept it directly from his hand, so with great care, he laid it atop the well-wall, where she could reach.

She bowed then, showing the straight part in the center of her hair, and a bit of smooth white forehead. Mori wondered what she looked like behind the fan. Whether she was pretty. Whether she was lonely, or sad.

As the woman straightened, she turned her sleeve with a subtle little flip, loosening a small object, which fell to the ground at Mori's feet. He knelt to retrieve it--the kind of tube for storing a paper scroll, it looked like--and was about to offer it back, when he realized quite suddenly, that no one was there. 

The woman and her light were gone. Leaving him alone under the newly-risen moon, with a scroll-tube and a bucket of water he couldn't drink.


	6. Chapter 6

6.

The problem of the water was solved when Mori made his unsteady way back to his traveling pack, to put the scroll away until daylight, when he could better examine it. There he found his store of sulphur matches, and remembered he'd been intending to make a fire, and try boiling the well water in his small traveling teapot, around the time he'd passed out.

The teapot had come from a rubbish bin, in some town far behind him now. The handle was bent, it was missing a lid, and it didn't hold more than a few cups, but the cast-iron body was practically indestructible. It was incredibly rare that he could afford tea, but the pot was useful for storing things, and he could place it directly over a campfire, or bury it half in coals without damaging it, so mostly it was his all-purpose cookpot. when he lived in the rough.

Besides the teapot, he had a chipped porcelain cup, a wooden bowl, and a pair of chopsticks, all discarded from a restaurant he'd once worked in briefly. So when Mori finally got his campfire going, the first pot of well water he boiled went into the cup first, for drinking, and the rest went into the bowl, for cleaning the wound on his arm. Then he refilled the pot, and set it to boil again. He intended to drink a lot of water that night, and fill his traveling canteen while he was at it.

Pulling the dried and crusted bandages off his arm was a misery, and rinsing the wound with hot water only made it worse. However--it was hard to tell by firelight--he thought the gash might not be too grievously deep, for all it had bled. The rock had scraped a wide strip off the length of his forearm, and sliced through several layers of skin up near his elbow. But it hadn't gone to muscle or bone, from what he could tell. Maybe he could've used one or two stitches across the slice, but he thought if he bound the area carefully, and avoided flexing his arm for several days, it might be all right.

After washing and studying the injury, Mori sucked up every bit of his courage, and poured a healthy dose of iodine directly on the broken skin. The immediate scorching pain made him hiss and grit his teeth, and at the height of it, he would swear it would've hurt less if he'd just stuck his arm in the fire. It made his eyes tear up and his head spin, but he knew it was better than the alternative, of losing his arm.

He rather wished that instead of a scroll he had no immediate use for, the ghost had left him some extra bandages. As it was, he only had enough for two dressings, and would have to boil and then dry one set, while wearing the other. Which meant he really couldn't risk going too far from the well, anytime soon. Though at least he had plenty of iodine, he reflected grimly.

**

The moon set, and his fire waned, and Mori drank enough water to convince his stomach it was full. And then, as he had done so many nights before, he curled up by the fire with his coat over his shoulders, and his traveling pack for a pillow, and sank into a dead, dreamless sleep.

**

It was around half an hour after sunset the next evening, and Mori was seated on a rock by his campfire, and eying the experimental dinner bubbling in his teapot; consisting of water, dandelion roots, a couple of mushrooms he'd found, and a few wild chestnuts--essentially what he'd scavenged from the area throughout the day. 

He was chiding himself for not going to inspect the cottage while there was still daylight, on the off chance there was anything in there which might help him. But foraging for food had been his main priority, and in between increasingly long rest breaks, he'd had to search hard to find anything he recognized as safe to eat. He was too unfamiliar with most of the trees and plants around this forest, and even knowing that it was generally safe to eat what the local animals ate didn't help him. Except for the occasional twittered rumor of a high-flying bird, Mori didn't encounter a single other living creature in the vicinity.

So at the waning end of the day, Mori was again tired, and tired of being hungry, and seriously wondering whether this place would end up killing him quickly or slowly. Mushrooms and dandelion roots would stave off immediate starvation, but without real sustenance, Mori would only grow weaker, and less able to fend for himself.

Ironically, he'd come to these mountains believing he'd be better off somewhere sparsely populated, far from the news and gossip that traveled between the flatland cities. He'd thought this would have to be better than scraping by in the fringes and dark alleyways of civilization, forever looking over his shoulder, begging odd jobs from those who wouldn't ask questions, and wouldn't search for him if he disappeared. 

Now he'd found out too late, how ill-prepared he really was for this kind of life. The skills he'd learned so far were all right for surviving in the countryside, a day's walk between towns. But surviving in this territory was a level far above that. And he had too much going against him.

The only direction he knew in these woods was the one he'd taken here. And if he started at tomorrow's first light, he might make it close enough to the main road he'd left, by nightfall. There was a way station down that road, where he might find someone to help him. Or another day further would bring him back to farm country. The harvest was over and done, but he could beg food and assistance, and maybe they'd let him pay it off in daily chores for a week or so.

It had been a mistake to try making it in the wilderness, he thought, staring gloomily into the flickering flames. And as much as he hated to admit defeat, or retrace his past steps, he was nigh out of choices.

With a dispirited sigh, he hooked his teapot stew out of the coals, taking care not to get singed by the sparks he stirred up, and then nearly tumbled headlong into the fire when he spotted the shape standing right at his shoulder.

He flinched sideways off his rock, flailed his bad arm, knocked a knee against a hot stone at the edge of his firepit, and then somehow landed half on his back in the dirt. Sheer instinct drove his heels into the ground; his only thought to get back from the threat before it struck, as he spared a glance upward to check the distance.... 

And then stopped.

It was last night's ghost. With the same many-layered kimono, the same fan hiding her features. Mori's heart slammed against his ribs, his breath coming in short gasps, while his suddenly over-charged brain tried to fill him in on everything at once. His elbows hurt, the fire was flaring up, his wound was bleeding again, the woman stood like a blue hole in the firelight; untouched by its color or shadows. Miraculously, he hadn't dumped his teapot over.

When he thought he had a grip on himself, Mori tried to speak.  
"If I'm bothering you, I'm sorry. But I'll be gone tomorrow."

The ghost flickered and vanished, and for a moment, Mori dared to hope the visit was concluded. But then a few meters off, past the reach of the firelight, she blinked into being again. This time, with her back to him. Arm raised, and pointing into the darkness across the clearing.

Briefly, he rested on his sore elbows, and weighed the merits of ignoring her. He would rather brood over his tasteless dinner, and go to sleep, and forget for awhile about this entire hopeless situation. But unfortunately, he knew better. He knew she would come back and hover the rest of the night, trying to get his attention. And if he didn't give it, she would probably resort to interference. Knocking his firewood about, sending gusts of dirt and dead leaves at him.

He had learned this, because he'd been ordered to ignore the strange things he saw, as a child. And the ghosts knocked over cups, and ruffled the pages of books, and slammed windows and doors, and blew scrolls to the floor. And of course, Mori was blamed for it. So he had to work out a compromise; ignore the ghosts when anyone was looking, and help them when no one else was around.

"It would be helpful, if there was some food where we're going," he murmured, pushing himself up and wincing. Though he figured the chances of it were slim. Ghosts generally prioritized their own affairs, and ignored the needs of the living. Still, he added, "If I could find some rice, I'd make an offering for you," on the off-chance it might persuade her any.

Mori followed the woman as she popped in and out of sight, across the clearing, and to the first rows of the orchard. Earlier in the day, he'd seen the state of the trees, grown to wild brambles across the rows, before they'd withered from lack of water. He'd found the irrigation trenches, long dry and filled with weeds, and concluded that even if he could fight his way through the mass of branches, it would be a waste of time and energy. There was no fruit to be had here, anymore.

It was a pity, he thought. The orchard must have been beautiful, before neglect had taken its toll.

At first, the ghost led him around the perimeter of the orchard, opposite the direction he'd explored earlier. As far as he could see, it was in just the same shape on both sides. The only difference was, where the other side backed up to a steep hill, the far end of the orchard on this side was being slowly overtaken by trackless forest. Small conifers were growing up between the orchard trees, huge brushy ferns sprouted in the rows, and thick ivy had overtaken most of the farthest row. Mori saw these things in the bursts and flutters of the ghost's light, whenever she paused for him to catch up.

It was among those last rows before the forest, that she led him. Mori had a bit of work then--pushing aside branches, and stepping over fallen limbs and forest saplings--to keep up with her, but each time she blinked into sight, he saw it was always on the clearest path from where he stood, and just near enough that he could see his way by her light.

They crossed the orchard in this way, on a slow zig-zagging trail, that Mori could only hope he'd remember if she left him in the dark again. And then at the far opposite back corner, where the ferns and baby pines and orchard trees all grew together, she turned and faced him. Raised her long sleeve, and pointed to a pile of jumbled rock covered in ivy.

Of course, Mori thought. Not food. Just more heavy lifting. 

Though he had to admit he was curious. How long must this woman have waited, for someone who could assist her? And what might her connection be, to the state of this place? And if there were more things she needed found, how long might it be until someone else came along, willing to follow her hints?

He would probably never know, Mori concluded, and started clearing the ivy from the rocks.

**


	7. Chapter 7

7.

It took a long time, moving the whole pile of rocks one-handed. Those he couldn't lift, he shoved along the ground, or flipped end-over-end until they cleared the pile. It was slow work, and his lack of stamina didn't help. He had to take breaks more often than he liked, and he sincerely wished he'd gone ahead and eaten his tasteless dinner before starting this errand.

If it hadn't been for the limited light, he might have sooner realized what he was working at. As it was, he had to take several breaks around the rock pile, making out what he could of the surroundings while he caught his breath, before he saw it.

They were at the furthest back channel of the orchard's irrigation canals. All the rocks he was moving, had been blocking the point where the channel left the orchard for the forest. Though he couldn't really see the point of the block; there was no water on the other side of the rocks either. If someone had meant to cut off the flow of water to the trees, then shouldn't the water be backed up on the forest side?

_Not if this was the dry season,_ he thought. And then, somewhat less rationally, _Not if there was a curse involved._

So what would happen, now that he was unblocking the channel? Would the water flow to the orchard again, when the rains came, in a few weeks?

And if there was a curse, was he somehow breaking it, or unwittingly taking it on himself with this work? On that question, Mori paused, a round white stone in one hand, and sat back on his heels.

"I understand that you need help," he said to the ghost. "And I don't mind helping. But I don't want to do something wrong, here." He weighed the stone in his palm. "I wish you could tell me this won't have bad consequences."

He sighed and set the stone aside, just as the light around him blinked out, leaving him in total darkness. He waited for the woman to appear somewhere nearby, as that seemed to be her habit, but as the seconds ticked on, he grew uneasy. He could see nothing. Not his hands in his lap, or his nose on his face.

Then he became aware of a breeze, sighing in the branches overhead, and on his next breath, he caught the smell of the forest; the tang of crumbling autumn leaves, and sweet evergreens. It was such a clean, pure scent, that even in the surrounding blackness, Mori felt his spirits lift a little.

This is what this place should always feel like, he thought. If the land around the clearing and the cottage had its own character, it had grown strange and unfriendly in its abandonment. It was meant to be fresh, bright, and flourishing. Not withered like the orchard, or stagnant like the well. It was meant to be cared for.

If only there was some way he could stay here. If only he had the provisions and the tools. Maybe he could bring this place back. Revive its spirit somehow, help it grow again.

"If you cared about this place," he said into the darkness, in case the woman was able to hear him, "I'm sorry you had to see it ruined. I would try to make it better, if I was able to. Maybe I can come back someday...."

He trailed off, on the realization that he could see again. There were the shifting shadows, and the fitful growing glow that told him the ghost was returning. And then a second or two before she fully appeared, something round and light dropped into the palm of his hand. He raised it up, peering closely to be sure--

And indeed, it was a large, ripe pear. Big and rounded, like an apple, with a heavy sweet scent that made his mouth water insanely.

It could be a trick. It could be poison. It could be any of a dozen things he should never put in his mouth. But for two days, he'd been starving, weak and aching for want of food, and his better sense had no more ability to summon any willpower.

"I really hope this was a gift," he managed. "And I am humbly grateful."

 

The pear was real, not poisoned, and every bit as delicious as it had smelled. Mori devoured it, core and all, and then forsook all decorum and licked his fingers when it was done. Then he bowed to the ghost, and said his thanks, and set to the task of moving rocks with inspired vigor.

If that pear was a sample of what had grown here, he reasoned, it was worth the risk of a curse, or whatever consequences he incurred. In his view of things, leaving such an orchard without water was simply criminal.

Once again, the moon was risen over the trees by the time he finished his task. The rocks that filled the irrigation trench were piled on either side, and the object of the ghost's search was finally uncovered.

It was a flat metal box this time. Undecorated, with a spring-catch fastening--the kind used on some jelly jars--that sealed the lid. Mori lifted the box up from the dirt, and set it atop some of the rocks, near the ghost, offering to open it if she wanted. And after some time passed with no response, Mori took that for consent.

The latch was stiff, as he'd expected, and it took a flat rock and considerable effort to get it open. Out of respect for the ghost's personal belongings, Mori took only a cursory glance at the contents-- a gleaming metal bracelet set atop folded silk, heavily embroidered--before laying the open box within her reach.

As before, the woman bowed her thanks. And once again, she flipped her sleeve, and an object dropped out, and clanged against the rocks next to Mori's knee. It was a heavy, old-fashioned key, the sort he'd seen for padlocks. But of course when he looked up again, to ask what it was for, there was no one to ask. The ghost and her box were gone.

By then, the moon was high and bright overhead, and looking around him, Mori thought he could probably retrace the path they'd taken in. He climbed to his feet, and took a look around to get his bearings.

And then he simply stood staring.

All of the trees around him, as far as he could tell, had pears hanging from the branches.

 

*****

For nine days in a row, Mori shared lunch with the fox, on his porch. Then on the tenth day, the storm blew in.

He'd felt it coming since the still, muggy dawn. Sweating through the morning's chores, without the slightest breeze for relief. In late summer, this thick air could hang for days, but in spring it almost always heralded a quick, violent change. So when the heavy breeze began to gust, he went and took his laundry off the drying line behind the cottage, brought in extra armloads of wood from the pile, secured the outdoor shutters over all the windows, hauled the cap off his rain barrel, and then dragged the corrugated metal cover over the root cellar door, so it wouldn't flood.

By the time he was done, the sky was a dense, ominous presence over the trees. A solid mass of dark blue cloud, pressing downward on the forest, as far as Mori could see. He sat on his porch with the door open behind him, watching swirls of dust and leaves chase across the clearing, and waited for the storm to break.

The first roll of thunder hit like a dynamite blast, echoing off the mountainsides, and though he'd been expecting it, Mori jumped. Lightning flickered in the clouds to the west, and a moment later another peal of thunder growled across the sky.

It took several seconds to fade, before Mori could catch the small noise underneath; what he first took for the patter of rain, pelting hard across the dirt but, right in time for the next bone-rattling boom, turned out to be the fox, galloping full-out for his porch.

He drew aside to make room, but it didn't appear to even see him, as it cleared the steps in one spring, claws scrabbling for traction at the top, eyes wide and fur bristled, and then streaked past him into the cottage.

Well, he thought, philosophically. He'd been meaning to clean the floors again, anyway.

The sky roared and crackled and then broke in a hard flood of rain, like a blinding shower of iron nails driving into the roof and the earth, and rattling off the window shutters. The wind drove the rain sideways, up under the porch eaves, and Mori finally retreated from the cold spray, to the front room.

He lit a few lamps against the gloom, carrying one back into his bedroom, where not that surprisingly, he found the fox by its bristled tail, quivering from under the altar cloth.

"I know it sounds like the place will blow apart," he said in a calm, soft tone. "But you are safe here. If you want to come out."

Thunder cracked, and the tail twitched and disappeared under the cloth.

"I think I'll make hotpot for lunch today," Mori mused aloud. "That's always good in weather like this." Then he turned and strode off quietly, to check his pantry.

As he'd hoped, the fox finally did venture out, when the food was done. He'd set aside an unseasoned portion of broth and rice for it, so it would cool, adding bits of vegetables, seaweed strips, and fish-cake. By then, the flash and noise of the storm had passed, though the rain continued, in heavy downbursts, between quieter showers. 

He would have a muddy day's work in the garden tomorrow, he reckoned, but at least there would be plenty of bath water.

He was seated at the low dining table, pouring tea, when the quiet click of nails on wood heralded the fox's approach. It came cautiously, a few steps at a time, with long hesitations. Not wishing to startle it, Mori simply waited, watching the shifting veil of rain through the half-open door. He heard it sniffing at the damp air wafting in, and then further nail-clicks and sniffing told him the fox was circling around behind him, exploring the rest of the room.

Eventually it came into his line of sight, stilled and glanced at him uncertainly, head and tail held low.

"It's okay. Look around if you want," he murmured.

After a bit, the fox moved toward the door, stopping at the threshold, and looking out, ears flicked forward and nose twitching. It put a foot over the threshold, and then drew it back. Sat, sniffed out the door, thumped it's tail twice on the floor, and then looked back over its shoulder, at Mori.

"The porch is all wet," he explained. "I'm eating inside, today." Pointing to the bowl he'd set on the floor, at the other end of the table, he added, "You're welcome to eat in here, too."

It took awhile for the fox to work out the concept, that food could be had indoors, as well as out. First, it made a slow, minute inspection of the cottage. Sniffing the corners and baseboards, wandering through the kitchen awhile. It came back to check the state of the porch, and the rain, and then set about investigating the low windowsills in the front room, the woodbox and the stove (snuffling energetically there, and then sneezing at the dust). After a third trip to the front door, it worked its way back to the hall, into the bath for a lengthy spell, and then back out again.

Mori finished his lunch, and his tea, and was trying to decide whether to finish work on a few sets of chopsticks he'd been whittling, or maybe crack a window and stretch out for a nap, when the fox finally approached the table.

"You know," he mentioned, "the first time I came in here, it was storming too."  
The fox sat next to the bowl and tucked its tail around its forelegs, watching Mori attentively.  
"Wherever you've been staying, it's probably flooded now. If you want to stay in here, I don't mind."

Following a few cautious sniffs, the fox decided to go ahead and eat inside, after all.

******


	8. Chapter 8

8.

 

On the morning he'd meant to cut his losses and depart the clearing, Mori was awakened by a mighty crack of thunder, followed immediately by rain in a freezing torrent. 

He went from deep sleep to a mad scramble in an instant; snatching up his pack, yanking his coat off his shoulders, and making a stumbling dash for the cover of the cottage porch, rain-blinded, before his eyes had even properly focused.

He didn't spare a thought for the ill-omened aspect of the cottage, or the suspicious, forbidding shadows of the porch, hemmed in by dead vines, and the bare whiplike tangle of thin tree limbs and wild shrubbery that had engulfed the rest of the place. In truth, all that was what had kept him away the day before. He'd kept poking around the clearing and the perimeter, because he simply couldn't muster the nerve to brave the cottage.

It took sudden alarm and blind self-preservation to get him up the porch steps; thinking no further than the calamity of wet clothes and wet firewood, Mori hastened to get his belongings out of the rain as quickly as possible. He threw his pack and coat up on the porch, and ran back for the pile of wood he'd gathered, praying it wasn't hopelessly soaked already. Then he returned to his firepit, and snatched up his clean bandages, before they could blow into the bed of ashes in the pit.

Though he'd moved as fast as possible, Mori's hair and clothes were thoroughly sodden, by the time he'd rescued everything. He stood dripping on the porch, chest heaving, wondering what he should do next.

And then the wind shifted, blowing buckets of rain across the porch as well.

"Hello? My apologies for intruding like this...." He didn't know if it was a good thing or not, that the door was unlocked. As he slid it cautiously open, he called out again. "I'm not here to make trouble. I just need to get out of the rain."

It was every bit as gloomy inside as he'd expected. But there was no response to his calling; no stir of animals, or flicker of ghosts. He set his pack and coat inside the door first, and then bent to remove his wet boots, before going in himself.

"Sorry for the mess. I'll clean it up before I--" He frowned disapproval at the bootprints on the wooden floor; dried mud and old water stains.

"--leave." Evidently, someone with less manners had been here before.

Leaving the door open behind him, for safety as well as light, Mori ventured further into the cottage. Other than the muddy prints on the floor, and the thick dust on the windowsills, it was clean. There were no cobwebs, or rodent droppings. No stains down the whitewashed walls, from leaks.

Then he spotted the potbellied wood stove, and the box next to it, piled with split firewood. Surely it was too good to be true. He eyed the black chimney pipe, leading up to the roof, and wondered what the odds were that it was clear enough to vent.

The cottage was chilly and damp on the inside, but nowhere near as menacing as it had looked from without. If Mori had to characterize the place, he'd say it felt lonely to him. As though it might rather be warm and cozy, instead of dusty and dark, and closed off from company.

It was probably only fancy on his part. But if he'd had some decent light in here, and the right supplies, he would want to clean the place up, just for the sake of seeing it clean. 

Start with the dusting, he thought, going through his traveling pack, and pulling out his last clean shirt. Clean the windows and the windowsills. Wash the mud off the wood floor, and then wax it until it glowed. It would look nice, with the sun coming in.

Outside, the thunder was still rolling off the mountainsides, and the rain poured like a waterfall. Thinking it was bound to go on like that for awhile, Mori stripped off his wet shirt, shivering, and used it to towel off his hair, before slipping the clean shirt on. Then he got out his matches (safe in a tight-lidded box wrapped with oilcloth, because he had learned that lesson ages ago), and headed over to find out if the wood stove was going to help him or not.

Of course, getting sun through the windows would meaning clearing off the deadwood from the sides of the cottage. He'd need an ax and a saw, and a good sturdy shovel. But if he worked every day, it shouldn't take more than a week.

As he peeled a few handfuls of bark off the logs in the woodbox (it would smoke a lot, but if the chimney was blocked, a small fire would be easier to put out), Mori tried to picture the view from the windows, unobstructed. Since they faced west, he could watch the sunset over the trees and hills every evening. In winter, he could look out on the snow-frosted woods. And in spring....

There should be a garden on that side, he decided. So that in spring and summer, he could watch it growing. Nothing so ambitious as the pear orchard, just a few vegetables and herbs, watered by rainfall. Radishes, squash, melon. One or two tomato vines. Carrots. Sweet potatoes. Maybe some strawberries.

With the bark-chips stacked in the stove, all that was left was to light it. He struck his match, cupping the flame in his palm, and set it carefully atop the dry bark, before closing the door, and crossing his fingers for luck.

 

Looking around for someplace to hang his wet clothing up to dry, Mori chided himself for indulging in daydreams. With the rain hammering steadily at the roof, and shivering puddles spreading across the clearing, his plans for retreat were obviously canceled. He'd traded off escape for warm shelter, but there was still the problem of food; the store of chestnuts and pears in his pack would only last him another day or two, and then he'd be right back where he'd started.

And yet.

The bathroom had a large cypress tub, barrel-shaped and bound in iron straps. Mori couldn't see well enough to tell whether the wood was still sound, but the black iron construction underneath--a broader, flatter version of the wood-stove, essentially--told him it was a heated bath.

He couldn't even remember the last time he'd been in a hot-water bath.

Clean the windows in here, and the room would be plenty well-lit. There was a bench built into the wall, for washing, right near a drain cut into the stone floor. After a long day's work, he could sit and scrub himself clean, and then sink into that deep hot bath and soak away all his weariness, until his muscles were loose and his mind was rested.

With a sigh, he pushed off the door frame, and left the chilly darkness for the warmth of the modest fire in the wood stove.

Rain had always made him sleepy and fanciful, for as long as he could remember. When the rains came pouring down, his ingrained practicality went off and napped somewhere, leaving Mori to imagine, and wish for things that common sense would tell him couldn't be.

He wished he had a home of his own. He wished he had a secure place to work and rest. He wished he could stay in one place long enough to see things grow; just to see the seasons change, on a small plot of land. To know he could sleep in the same bed every night, from summer to winter, in fair weather and foul.

With his travel pack in his lap, Mori sat against the wall near the wood stove, savoring one of his precious pears, and watching the room fall into deeper dimness as the gray light outside seeped away. He wished he had grilled fish and rice to go with his pear. He wished he could crawl into a warm, clean bed after dinner, and sleep without worries until the sun rose again.

He awakened with a stiff neck, to a dead fire and silence outside, and the whole room bathed in shifting, flickering blue.

Here we go again, he thought. As long as he was wishing for impossible things, a house without any ghosts might be nice, too.

"I borrowed a little firewood," he told the woman, when she appeared. "But I'll replace it. And I won't take anything away from here."

Slowly, the ghost glided along the far side of the room, the folds of her kimono trailing soundlessly behind her. She stopped at a narrow, high niche in the wall, not far from the doorway leading to the dark kitchen, and there she knelt.

"Oh," said Mori. The niche hadn't registered with him before, but suddenly he understood what it was. "That's the tokonoma." The alcove where traditionally, one placed flower arrangements according to season, and where long painted scrolls usually hung.

He wasn't sure whether kneeling there was part of the ghost's usual routine, or if there was something she expected of him. Thus far, she'd been fairly straightforward; pointing, or simply leading him to where she required him. He had been taught it was rude to interrupt someone contemplating a tokonoma, and figured the courtesy applied whether it contained anything or not, so waiting seemed to be the best thing for now.

A few minutes passed, with no change, until Mori surreptitiously bent to rub the soreness out of his neck, and stretch his legs. The movement dislodged his travel pack, which had been sitting on his lap all along, and it slid sideways to the floor, upending half the contents.

He went to gather everything (a couple of pears, his teapot, a ball of socks in dire need of washing, and a small bundle of incense), glanced up to see if the noise had disrupted the ghost, did a double-take at the open flap of his pack, and froze, open-mouthed.

He'd forgotten entirely about the scroll.

 

"I'm sorry. Does this belong here?" he asked, approaching the tokonoma. The ghost tilted her fan to keep it between them, but her face was turned to the blank alcove.

He'd been frankly baffled by the scroll, when he'd opened it the day before. Under the hemp cord and the waxy wrapping paper, he'd found the long roll of faded silk, edges bound in thick thread, with a tasseled cord fixed to the top. The silk was thin with age in some places, and Mori had taken great care in unrolling it. But no matter how closely he'd looked, he couldn't make out anything painted on it.

Beyond a wash of gray, pale at the top and darkening toward the bottom, he'd seen no other marking. No calligraphy, no subject. He looked it over back and front, but it was blank.

Still, she'd given him the scroll. And now here was a tokonoma without a scroll. If there was another conclusion to be drawn here, Mori wasn't seeing it. And if there was some reason the scroll shouldn't be hung in this place, the ghost would probably let him know somehow.

So he undid the hemp cord, pulled away the wax paper, and gently unrolled the silk.


	9. Chapter 9

9.

 

Mori's first impulse on viewing the scroll the second time, was to turn back and stare over at his pack, to see if he'd gotten the wrong scroll.

Of course, that couldn't be. He only had one scroll. But the one in his hands....

It was the same faded, thinning silk, with the same thread-bound border. Same tassel, even. But now it had an image painted on it. And calligraphy.

 

_The path in moonlight,_  
The last autumn leaf blows by,  
A house stands empty. 

_Tend the fire and keep the promise;  
The wanderer turns for home._

The image was a loose sketch, in shades of gray ink; the moon shrouded in cloud, with a suggestion of a lone pine branch curving in.

A bit somber for a seasonal scroll, but he had to admit it was beautifully done. The characters spilled down the silk in a delicate, flowing hand, and the ambiguity of the verse was well-suited to the nuances of the painting.

Unfortunately, there was nothing at all to suggest how the scroll had become painted, when it had been perfectly blank before.

Though on the other hand, Mori reminded himself, he had just been eating a pear which he would've sworn hadn't existed, the morning before. He'd cut himself up on a rock that hadn't appeared prior to injuring him. And he was about to hang a scroll to appease a woman who had evidently been dead a very long time. This was hardly the time to start fussing over plausibilities.

He was just looping the scroll's hanging tassel over a small hook in the plaster, when the wind shoved a hard gust at the cottage.  
"Sounds like another storm," he murmured, gently drawing the scroll down to its full length, before stepping back to gauge whether it was straight.  
"I hope this doesn't bother you, here," he told the ghost, who was presumably gazing on the scroll, from the other side of her fan. "But thank you, for sharing it with me."

He stepped back, to give her space at the tokonoma again, just as the wind rose up, rattling around the stove chimney and whistling under the porch eaves. "Maybe I should shut that door," he mentioned, but then stopped mid-turn, thinking he should build up the fire again first, before the ghost could leave him in the dark again.

And then the ghost moved, and Mori drew up short.

She was bowing, on her knees, sleeves to the floor, and long hair spilling over her shoulders. For long seconds, neither of them moved, as the rising wind buffeted the cottage with a will, and Mori wondered whether the ghost would produce another mysterious object from her sleeve for him, or if this prostration meant her affairs were finally settled, and she was giving her farewell.

"The last task is done." The voice was a scrap of fragile silk, drifting past Mori's ear, under the restless keening of the wind. "The debt is repaid."

"Wait--." He surely wasn't imagining it. The ghost's bluish luminance was growing paler by the moment, which must mean she was truly departing. 

He dropped to his knees, desperately hoping he could get at least one answer from her, before she was gone. But a hundred questions crowded his head at once, like a logjam, and he couldn't pick one to fit words to.

"Please, do you know if there's a town close by? Or another place like this, where someone lives?"

"Tend this place, and it will shelter you." 

The wind was shrieking now, tearing at the roof, and the walls of the cottage. He had to crouch to his elbows to hear the ghost's last words, flinching as the cottage walls creaked and groaned around him.

"...You have earned the key, and the door will be uncovered."

"Wait!" Mori threw his arms over his head, expecting the roof beams to give any second, watching helplessly as the ghost's form faded into pure white light, a brilliance that swelled and filled the room, stripping away every shadow. The white glare burned his eyes, and Mori finally squinted them shut, curled down and tucked his face into his arm to save his sight.

The floorboards rattled with the surrounding cyclone roar, screaming in his ears and his bones, and Mori knew this was it, this was the end of everything. 

In those final moments all he could think, was what a shame it was. What a disappointment, that he would never get to see the pear trees blossom.

**

He came sluggishly to the conclusion that he wasn't dead, thanks to two clues: his ears were ringing, and the wound in his arm was throbbing mercilessly.

His hunger went without saying. Raising his head with slow care, Mori first spied the floor, still intact under his knees. 

He turned and confirmed the wall to his left, and the tokonoma. Scroll still hanging, miraculously on its hook. Then pushing up further, he identified the back wall, wholly undamaged.

Something did feel distinctly different about this room, but in his present state of fuzzy shock, he couldn't begin to put his finger on it. He turned, slowly on his knees and took in the stove and chimney pipe, the west wall, with its shuttered windows, and then completed his about-face with the open front door.

Oh. It was morning. That would explain why his knees were so sore.

He shuffled out onto the porch, and spent several seconds blinking at his boots, which had no right at all to be exactly where he'd left them yesterday. And yet they persisted in being there.

What also persisted in being there was the forest around the clearing. He stumbled a bit, going down the steps in his unlaced boots, but that didn't distract him in the least from boggling at the perfectly intact line of trees, the weeds and underbrush only a little pummeled by yesterday's hard rain. His firepit was a soaked mess of ash, but he couldn't see a single stone out of place. Even the small pile of twigs he'd been unable to rescue were still there.

For all the cataclysmic noise of that wind last night (or a few hours ago, whichever it was. Time always played tricks when ghosts were involved), he could see absolutely no effect at all on the landscape.

Until he turned around and saw what was behind him. The sight made him stagger back a step, and his unsteady knees almost dumped him back on his rear-end. He shook his head hard and rubbed at his tired eyes, forced them to focus, but the view of the cottage didn't change.

It was all gone. 

All the dead vines and hedge, all the branches and choking weeds; every bit of it had been torn away. The ground was littered with twigs and shreds of bark, and a scattering of thin trunks and stems jutted up from the earth, where whole shrubs had been snapped off above the roots. But the sides of the cottage, from the ground to the roof, were clear.

And there was something else different. Something about the air, and the feel of the early morning sun touching his skin. 

It felt normal, he realized. It felt just the way that air and sunshine always did, in the wide outdoors.

The smallest breeze teased the fringes of his hair; he heard it shift the treetops at the edge of the clearing. And above that rustling whisper of air, he heard a bird break into warbling song, not five meters off.

This was nothing like the place he'd come upon three days back. The geography and outlines of everything were exactly the same. But it was like someone had traced a copy off a painting, and colored it with an entirely different palette from the original. The sun was brighter, the shadows less sharp. The air, which had felt weirdly stale before, was now keen and vibrant, just like an autumn morning in the mountains ought to be.

It wasn't even a conscious decision to explore the place again; Mori simply found himself walking, drawing in deep, cleansing breaths, and staring at everything with entirely new eyes.

The front of the cottage no longer looked menacing at all, only a little worn with weather and age. The walls and window shutters were intact, and walking around back, it looked like the posts which supported the place hadn't settled noticeably. Which meant the foundation had somehow stayed level, all this time.

Coming around from the back, to the east side of the cottage, Mori was studying the roofline at the moment he tripped and nearly fell headlong across the set of doors leading into the ground.

They were raised above the ground on a stone frame, about ankle-high; thick slabs of oak sealed with pitch, and bolted to black cast-iron hinges at all four corners. 

A bizarre, empty calm settled over Mori, when he recognized the shape of the bronze lock, bolting the doors together. He hadn't forgotten the ghost's final words, and they made perfect sense now. But even with a significant piece of the puzzle in place, he felt no curiosity, no excitement, or even the least flicker of any hope.

The doors may have been uncovered, but even if he could wrestle them open, there couldn't possibly be anything inside he could use. In the amount of time this place must have been abandoned and haunted, any food would have rotted to dust. Anything cloth or wood would have simply crumbled away. At best, all he would find would be the mummified remains of someone's life and livelihood, long since passed.

He had to be practical. He had to stay focused on surmounting the very real problems in front of him. He didn't have the time to spare for wishes or treasure-hunts.

These were the things he told himself, as he completed his circuit of the cottage, and mounted the porch steps again.


	10. Chapter 10

10.

 

"I am not getting my hopes up." Mori regarded the key in his hand impassively. He had lined up the entirety of his provisions; five pears, a few handfuls of soggy chestnuts, and a full canteen. This was all he had to live on.

He put the key aside, and set about changing the dressing on his wound. It didn't look good. His lower forearm was trying to scab over, but the slice up near his elbow was wet and angry red around the edges. Rinsing it with (hopefully) sterilized water stung, and the iodine scorched, and Mori could only tell himself that the pain was supposed to mean it was helping.

And then his arm was bandaged again, and he'd breakfasted on a pear and six chestnuts, and put down a lot of water to hush the gaping space left in his stomach. And the key was still there. Waiting for him.

Of course he intended to open those doors before he left. But he wanted a good firm grip on himself beforehand. He couldn't afford to tarry here. He had to be ready to move on.

When he had those priorities firmly fixed in his heart, Mori took the key, and went outside.

The lock was deceptively easy to turn, which Mori figured for a testament to the thickness of the overgrowth that had surrounded the cottage before. It was the doors that were the challenge.

He put all he had into tugging at the heavy iron handles below the lock. Bracing his feet on the ground, and on the stones, and hauling upwards with his good arm, for all he was worth. But the doors refused to budge. 

On close inspection, he saw that the pitch coating on the wood had been applied in layers, heavily over the seam between the doors. Someone had wanted to guarantee that the doors would stay waterproofed, even if a flood came. From the looks of it, Mori thought a flood could have carried off the cottage, and still these doors wouldn't have leaked.

He hunted down a rock with a thin sharp edge, and used it to carve away as much of the pitch as he could, from the seam. When the first rock cracked halfway through the task, he went and got another.

As he scraped and dug, he was aware of a lively chorus of birdsong picking up in the nearby trees, and the flicker of butterflies here and there, at the edges of his vision. It was as though all around him, the clearing was waking up, and the outside world was creeping in, bit by bit.

When the seam between the doors was as clear as he could get it, Mori went hunting for a thick, sturdy branch. He tested a few, by flexing them over his knee, before finding one he thought would hold up. Then he brought it over to the doors, and jammed one end into one of the handles, to use as a lever.

He bore down on the other end, putting his body weight into it, watching the branch arc down. Before the branch could snap, he eased up, moved closer to the door handles, and pressed down again. 

Slowly, steadily, he increased his weight on the branch. And then just at the point he thought his lever would break, there was a scrape and squeal of metal, and the one door popped free.

The morning sun was spilling over the treetops, by the time he got both doors open wide, giving him a clear view into the root cellar. It was a small, painstakingly constructed chamber of stone and mortar, with a wooden ladder leading down to a flagstone floor, about two meters down. There were wooden shelves, holding a few wooden boxes and jars of glazed ceramic, and on the floor, there were two metal boxes, with very recognizable spring-catch lids.

"I'm just looking," Mori reminded himself. Because it was hard to shake the memory of two nights ago, prying open that metal box for the ghost. He hadn't inspected the contents that closely, but the condition of the silk he'd seen....

What would it take to preserve silk, under a pile of rocks, through rain and snow, for a year? Let alone ten years, forty years? However long it must have been. And if silk could survive in one of these boxes....

Four pears, twenty-some-odd chestnuts, and a full canteen. That's all he had. That was all he could count on.

The boxes weren't actually on the floor, he discovered. They were set into it, with flagstone and mortar all around, sticking up about two hands'-widths from the floor. And just as Mori was thinking he'd have to climb back up and find a rock to pry the latches open, he chanced to spot the row of tools hanging from hooks in the opposite wall.

Shovel, rake, pickaxe, hatchet, hoe. Short spade, trowel, and a thing with a short handle and iron prongs he'd never seen before, but was obviously good for digging with. He caught himself picturing all that open space on the west side of the cottage, and shook his head, hard.

The spade would work fine, he decided, and pulled it off the hook.

He had the spade propped under the latch of one sealed box, ready to pry it open, when he realized he had given no thought to how he'd seal the cellar doors again, before he left. 

It wouldn't be right, to break into the cellar and then simply leave it that way. Regardless of whether he'd 'earned' the key or not, leaving everything in here to ruin, after so much care had been taken to preserve it, was out of the question. 

He'd have to think of a way to repair the seal. Maybe he could build a fire, and melt the pitch he'd scraped away. Maybe he could find some flat rocks, or wedge strips of wood between the doors....

And maybe he was just stalling.

Check inside the boxes, and then worry about sealing the doors, he told himself sternly. Quit burning daylight.

He blew out a breath, twisted the spade handle, and popped the latch on the first box. It sprung open easier than expected, but then he had to wedge the spade in the crack under the lid, and pry at it on all four sides to get it off, and then--.

"No." Mori sat back on his heels, wholly unaware of the spade slipping from his hand and clattering to the flagstones. 

It was impossible. It was a trick. A mistake.

He had no idea how long he stared at the contents of the box. But when it failed to disappear under the sheer force of his disbelief, he put out a cautious hand. 

Shaking, his fingers outstretched, and in his head a litany of--(it can't be, don't you dare hope now, don't think this can save you, it's simply not possible)--denial edging into desperation.

Even in a sealed box, even in a sealed cellar. Even if the silk had survived (a year? ten years? a hundred?), there was no conceivable way that this rice--a month's supply, at least, judging by how deep his hand sank in--could still be edible.

There was only one way to know, for sure.


	11. Chapter 11

11.

 

Mori was just picking the last bits of shed fur off his altar cloth, when the distinctive click of nails on wood announced his visitor's return.

"Ah. It must be lunchtime," he said, with a wry smile which got stuck crooked, when he turned around.

Sure enough, the fox must have found its former outside lodgings flooded out. It stood in the short hall from the front room, with an awkward, stiff posture. Mud caked its legs, from feet to belly, making the fur stand out in spikes and cowlicks. Its tail was clumped and muddy, and across its face was a wide streak of dirt.

"I don't imagine there is any chance at all, you'd let me bathe you," Mori said. The fox looked around with a confused and faintly disappointed air. Like a man who'd been thrown from his horse, and hadn't been hurt in the fall, but was only wondering where his ride had gone.

"Well. Good thing I left the broom out."

 

Mori himself had been muddied to the knees and elbows earlier in the morning, in the process of cleaning up the vegetable plot, and retying the tomato vines to their stakes. The ground between the rows was squelchy, dragging at his boots with every step, and after an hour's work, he decided there was nothing so pressing out there that he needed to keep fighting through mud to accomplish it.

So he'd stripped off his muddy clothing outside, boots and pants and shirt, and headed in to wash his hands and hair, before switching to housekeeping work for the day.

 

"Think it will rain again today?" he asked the fox, setting out a dish of eggs and rice for it, on the porch.

The fox sighed deeply, rubbing a muddy forepaw across its dirty face, streaking it further.

"I know. It's itchy when it dries." 

On a curious impulse, he reached out his fingers, slowly toward the fox's face until the fox left off frowning at its feet, and focused warily on Mori's approaching fingertips.

"I can rub that off, if you'd like." The fox drew its head back, tipping its nose up to intercept Mori's hand, which he held still, for the fox's inspection.

It tickled, the brush of wet nose and whiskers, but Mori managed not to twitch and kept his hand level, while the fox sniffed at his fingers, his thumb, and then worked its nose up underneath to snuffle at his palm.

It must be smelling the food on his hands, he reasoned, biting his lip against the reflexive urge to twitch at the wispy ticklish brushes against his skin. The fox seemed determined to investigate every millimeter of his hand, working its way up his palm to the thin skin inside his wrist. 

The movement put his fingers right above the white blaze of fur on the fox's face, where the dried mud was thickest, and Mori carefully flexed his fingers, until they just brushed the dirty patch. He gave a tentative scratch there, just a couple times with his fingertips, and then paused. 

The fox waited a second, then nudged at his wrist.

"You don't mind that?" Mori was a bit surprised; he'd fully expected the fox to dart back, when he touched it.

He rubbed a little more at the spot, and the fox took a few mincing steps in place, and settled on its haunches, tail thumping the floor. Feeling emboldened, Mori brought his thumb up, rubbing the base of the fox's ear, and adding pressure with his fingers, to loosen the crusted dirt.

At first the fox sat still, squinting short-sighted at his hand, and then it started butting its forehead up against his palm, seeking a more vigorous touch. Mori flicked away the dirt he'd loosened, and scratched his way up the fox's forehead, between the ears, and then around the back, enjoying the texture of its coat; slightly coarse at the top of its neck, but fine and silky going up its ears.

Eventually the fox ducked from under his hand, stood and shook itself all over, ears flapping against its head.

"Feeling better now?" Mori smiled. 

The fox gave another shake, with a little snuffling sneeze at the end, and stepped over to investigate its lunch.

 

They shared the porch together after the food was done; Mori propped against one of the support beams for the porch overhang, and the fox seated with its front legs outstretched, surveying the clearing as the slow-moving clouds threw drifting patches of shadow across the grass and earth.

Mori thought that for all the trouble and effort it might sometimes entail, living alone and beholden to no one had some distinct advantages. Such as on days like this, when he felt too comfortable and lazy to get up and see to his muddy clothes, still piled on the ground where he'd left them.

He supposed he could drag the wash tub over by the well, fill it up and soak his pants, shirt, and socks. He could get the washboard out, and scrub at the mudstains, and then rinse everything out a dozen times or so.

Or he could sit here and ponder what he could do, without doing anything about it.

The other thing he could ponder, was whether to wait until the fox was done shedding clumps of dirt everywhere, before sweeping the floors again. Or if there was some shortcut he could find, that the fox wouldn't object to.

The washtub would be out of the question. As would a good dousing with a bucket. It was highly doubtful the fox would ever let him near it again, if he tried that. It might allow him to wipe it down with a wet towel, if he introduced it carefully. But that could take days, and he might as well wait for the mud to fall away on its own.

Would the fox go into running water, he wondered? Surely it was accustomed to crossing creeks and streams in the forest. And come to think of it, a running creek would be a lot more efficient than the washtub, for getting the mud out of his clothes.

The only question was whether a round trip down to the creek behind the orchard wouldn't involve getting more mud on the both of them than it would clean away.

Though it was probably a good idea to go down there and check the drainage after all that rain, regardless.

"Hm." He looked to the fox, who was watching the clearing with all the interest of a theatre-goer at a stage drama. "What do you think about taking a walk?" 

**

It was probably an insult to the rice he'd uncovered, and not exactly the best way to achieve a good first impression of it, to cook it in his teapot, on the iron vent-plate atop the wood stove. But Mori was entirely too hungry to care. It would have been better in a proper pot. It would have been better if he'd used a lid, and cooked it until all the water was absorbed.

It turned out both soupy and crunchy, with a stale starchy flavor to remind him he'd neglected to rinse it first. But it was food. And with the dried seaweed strips he'd rolled it up in, and the pickled radish he'd found in one of the sealed jars, they filled his stomach, and awakened his brain, and fortified his spirits.

After he'd eaten (because he'd had to find out if the rice was any good, it was the one condition that so much depended on), he returned to the cellar. It wasn't just tools and foodstuffs stored down there; it looked like everything that could've been carried off from the cottage during its vacancy had been hidden away in the cellar. Mori found cooking pots, utensils, bowls and cups and--here he stared and licked his lips, before taking a long look at the shelves--a proper full-sized teapot.

There was a box of tea on one shelf, and Mori closed his eyes when he breathed in the aroma of it.

He also found a pair of futons, greatly in need of airing, and a trunk of folded quilts, next to a piece of furniture draped in a sheet--a rectangular box of dark wood, lightly varnished, with a pair of doors fastened shut by a brass hook latch. He murmured a few words of prayer and respect that rose from his memory, before opening the household altar.

Save for a ceramic incense bowl, and stub of wax candle, it was empty.

Another box on the shelf held a calligraphy set. Inkstone, bowl, and brush, but Mori found no paper anywhere.

However the things he did find, led him to think that surely there had to be a town or settlement, not too far from here. The label on the tea-box bore a sketchy little drawing of a mountain village; peaked roofs tucked into a wooded valley, with a stream winding in on one side. There was a similar drawing on the wooden apple crate where the cooking utensils had been stored.

And of course the orchard could be evidence. Surely all those trees hadn't been nurtured to maturity, just to satisfy the person (or persons) living in a four-room cottage.

The rice and the red beans (for that was the contents of the other metal box) changed everything for him. With those staples, he could survive here until his strength returned. And more importantly, he could take provisions and explore the surrounding forest.

But before any of that, Mori owed someone his sincerest gratitude.

 

He chose to set the altar up in the back room of the cottage, simply because it was something he'd been accustomed to, growing up. The residents of the temple had slept five or six to a room, and each of those rooms had a small altar, not unlike this, for private meditation and devotions. Seeing the altar first thing when he woke up and last thing before he went to sleep had, in some inexplicable way, defined home for Mori. There had been no altar in any of the places he'd slept, since the time he'd left.

He had made a second pot of rice (with greater care this time), put it into a handsome glazed bowl he'd found, and placed it on the altar, with a pair of chopsticks set into the rice, pointing upward. To the side, he put a small wooden plate of pear slices, arranged like the petals of a daisy, and then he went and fetched a stick of incense from his pack, and lit it in the altar's bowl.

"Please accept this poor offering, as thanks for your guidance," he prayed, for the woman's departed ghost. "I hope you can rest now, and know that you will be honored and remembered gratefully here, for as long as I live."

After thinking it over, he added, "I'm not sure what your debt was, but I'm glad you could repay it. It must have been important, since you waited such a long time. If no one else honors you for that, then I will. I won't forget."


	12. Chapter 12

12.

 

After gathering what was left of the pears from the back of the orchard, curiosity had led Mori to inspect the newly rushing stream at the irrigation inlet. It was on this exploration that he discovered the property's other interesting inhabitant.

"If you're done with my stones, I would like them back."

Hearing the voice from the water, Mori instinctively backpedaled from the edge of the stream, slipped on a loose stone (he was reasonably certain he'd seen this one), and sat down hard on a soggy rotten log.

When he saw the speaker, he thought it might be best if he stayed put for a moment. Primarily because he wasn't too sure what it was.

It was leaning half-out of a deep spot in the stream. Slick and shimmery all over, like the belly of a carp. Long thin arms, elbows propped on the bank. Something like hair--or rather more like thin-soaked stalks and stringy algae, where hair would be on a _person_.

"I beg your pardon," said Mori, falling back on manners when reason failed him utterly. The creature's odd silvery eyes looked him up and down. "Am I trespassing here?"

Its face had a delicate, translucent quality, somewhat at odds with the businesslike expression it wore. If it had a gender, he couldn't begin to guess what it might be.

"I said before, you could let the water in for your trees," it told him. "And you could use the stones to stop the water. But since you're not stopping the water anymore--." Here, it gestured with one long arm, light and thin as bird bones or glass straws, at the water pouring freely into the orchard now, "I came for my stones. Because we agreed."

Mori was about to point out that he'd never seen this creature before in his life. That he was terribly sorry, but it must have mistaken him for someone else. And then it struck him, that the being had obviously made a bargain with that someone else, and maybe he could learn something here.

"I'm happy to return your stones. But I'm afraid I'm not the same person who borrowed them from you. Do you know how long ago it was?"

The creature looked like it would squint doubtfully at him, if only it had eyelids to squint. "You walk on two long legs, and you have black hair on top. And none in the middle," pointing a stick-thin finger at its chin. "What is not the same?"

Mori figured it would be a waste of breath to explain that the creature had just described a fifth of the people he had ever met, and that it should probably be more specific about its criteria. 

For all he knew, its silver-shiny eyes didn't work so well out of water. And it might be insulting to bring up things like eyebrows and noses and ears, to someone who didn't appear to have any.

"Um. There are a lot of people who look like me. But I just came here a few days ago. Before it rained."

The creature regarded him flatly, seeming to consider this information at length.

"Can I have my stones now?" 

This could only be a water spirit. Mori had never met one, but he'd read the stories, and the description seemed to fit. He could further conclude that reasoning with it would be like reasoning with the stream it lived in; not very helpful, and ultimately exhausting.

"Yes, of course." He pushed himself up from the rotten log, and brushed off as best he could, choosing to ignore the chilly wet soaking his back and the seat of his pants.

 

Carrying the water spirit's stones back to their owner turned out not to be an altogether fruitless task. For one thing, he learned more about the orchard's irrigation. For another, he learned that the stones had all been specially chosen, for properties he had never suspected any stones of having.

It appeared the orchard had been watered by a stream, which wound back through the forest and uphill, where it branched off from a river tributary. A short distance after the branch was a narrow, deep pool, tucked into a sheltered plateau, with steep rock rising on either side.

Reaching the pool wasn't difficult; Mori simply followed the stream and the water spirit, flashing like a leaping salmon in places where the sun broke through the forest canopy. What was difficult, was making sense of the pool itself.

Everywhere he had ever been, water ran downhill. Period. Unless a dam or a drain were involved, it was a universal fact. And yet the orchard at the bottom of this stream had been dry until today, and the stream itself had been nothing but an empty bed. He had seen it before, on his search for food, and at the time had thought nothing of it.

But now, the further uphill he followed the water spirit, the more he began to wonder at the sheer volume of water swelling the stream and rushing downward. Surely this was more water than yesterday's hard rain could account for? He kept on the lookout for other streams, or blockages that might have been washed aside in the rainstorm, thinking that must explain it. But he saw nothing like that, and then they reached the pool.

The pool wasn't overflowing, like he might have expected. Rather--judging by the plainly visible high-water line rimming the rocks all around--it appeared to be draining at a rapid rate.

"Excuse me," he said to the water spirit, flashing and glimmering at the far end of the pool now. "But what feeds this pool?"

"River, rain, and snow," the spirit answered, and then pointed to a spot on Mori's left. "The flat stone goes there."

Mori put the stone in the indicated spot, and straightened. "Is the river blocked? Is that why it's draining here?"

"Did you bring the round gray stones?"  
Mori glanced in the small basket he'd carried up. There'd been so many stones to move, that a basket and multiple trips was his only option. "No. I have a round white one." He held it up for inspection, and the spirit pointed to a spot midway alongside the pool.

"Put it there."

"Do these all belong in certain places?" asked Mori, wondering how long the process would take, if so. The pile of stones he'd moved at the bottom of the stream had been sizable, after all.

The spirit leveled a look at him across the pool; a look that plainly stated its estimate of Mori's intelligence. "How else would the currents get balanced?"

"Ah," Mori nodded, not a bit more enlightened than he was before.  
"That's why you agreed to give the stones back."  
"Right."  
"Do you have the black ones?"

Mori looked in the basket, stifling a sigh. "I have three black ones." To be honest, he was starting to miss the ghost a little. She hadn't been any better about answering his questions, but at least her tasks were less exacting.


	13. Chapter 13

13.

 

Three basket-trips and an accidental dunking in the pool later, Mori had a slightly better handle on things. But only slightly.

"So. When I moved these stones, that's what made the stream run?"

"Isn't that what I said? You put the stones there to stop the water, and when you take them away, the water moves again."

"But there was no water at the stones." Mori shifted the basket to his hip, and rubbed between his eyes, where a headache was throbbing. "The whole stream was dry. Shouldn't the water stop where the stones are?"

"If it did that, the pool would run dry, and the forest would flood, and the river would leave course."

Which was exactly Mori's point. All those things should have happened, but they hadn't, and his utter failure to see what a pile of rocks at the bottom of a dry stream could possibly have to do with it, had finally led to this dull thumping headache.

"So then," he doggedly pressed on, unable to give up yet. "If I got some more stones, and put them by the orchard, would the water stop again, all the way up here?"

"Stones from your field?"  
"Or from anywhere," Mori shrugged helplessly.

"Of course not. Put all those white ones right there."  
Mori's headache spiked again, but he bent to place the handful of white pebbles where he'd been instructed. 

....Only to freeze in place at the sound of a man laughing.

"Oi, Mizuko-chan, please go easy on our neighbor. He didn't know about your special stones before."

The first thing Mori did, purely on reflex, was check the size of the rocks closest to hand. Secondly, he looked up to see who had spoken.

The man was descending the craggy rock face on the far side of the pool, stepping lightly down a path that could hardly be more than the width of his feet. Bits of gravel and dirt broke away at his passage, trickling down to the banks of pool, but it didn't seem to concern him any. "I'm sorry Mizuko-chan had to come alone, but my canoe got caught in some rapids, with the river so low."

Once he got nearer the ground, Mori could see that the man wasn't quite his height, but a certain lankiness about the arms and legs gave the impression of tallness. He had longish black hair, tied back, round silver spectacles, and a straw hat, decorated around the brim with bits of metal that winked in the sunlight. Fishing lures, Mori realized, as the man got closer.

"Good thing you're putting those stones back now," the man grinned at him, hopping neatly from the rock to the ground "Otherwise you'd end up with the whole river at your front door."

"I apologize for any trouble," Mori said. "Someone asked me to move these stones down at the orchard, the other day. If I'd known it would be a problem...."

"Eh, no harm done," the man gave a lazy, dismissive wave. "Soon as I saw the river drop, I figured someone had finally worked out that orchard. I was just headed down to see if you needed help. Most folks who end up there do, y'know."

Mori nodded, because that at least, he could understand. "So you've been there? Did you know anyone who lived there before?"

"I never saw anybody living there. But Mizuko-chan knew someone, right?" He turned and smiled at the water spirit, who'd been watching the conversation from a shadowy spot in the pool.

"The blue person? They're gone now."  
Mori glanced from the water spirit to the man, who was giving him an assessing look. "Is that so? I guess you'd be the new caretaker then. You must be quite a fellow."

Mori wasn't sure where to begin explaining that actually, the last four days had been a series of unreal accidents, and mostly he'd just been hoping not to starve to death.  
"I can't presume to make any claim here. Really, I was just lost."

"But you've slept in that cottage?"  
"It was raining," Mori admitted.  
"You drank from the well?"  
"I boiled the water, first."

The man's eyes dropped to his bandaged arm, and narrowed slightly. "What's that?"  
Mori glanced down. "Oh. I got a cut, from a rock."  
"In the forest?"  
"No, I tripped in the clearing. I'm hoping it will heal, soon."

"Bled a lot, did it?"  
"Yes," Mori confessed. "It was worrisome, but I think it's getting better."

"Hm." The man looked up at him, glasses winking, and a faintly roguish tilt to his eyebrows. "Sounds to me like the place claimed you first."

But before Mori could ask what on earth the man meant, the water spirit broke in.  
"This side needs more of the gray stones. The current isn't coming in straight."

"Ah, Mizuko-chan is a slave driver," the man laughed. "But she's very serious about her duties. If this gentleman doesn't mind, I'll pitch in and help out. We'll get it sorted fast, and then Mizuko-chan will be happy again."

"Thank you," Mori bowed. "But if I've caused a problem here, I don't want to impose on you more."  
"Nah, it's nothing," the man answered, with another hand wave. "If you've got a place to cook the fish I brought, we'll call it square."

At the mere mention of fish, Mori swallowed involuntarily. "I'd be happy to help with that." And then his manners kicked in and he bowed a second time. "Please forgive me for not introducing myself. I'm Morinozuka."

The man replied with a bow of his own. "Please call me Onuma. I'm very happy to have Morinozuka-san as a neighbor."

 

"So you know feng-shui, right?" Onuma asked, on their way back down to the orchard, when the task of moving stones was finally done.

"I've heard about it," said Mori. He hadn't personally subscribed to the idea of manipulating the earth's energy in that way, but he'd known a few people who took it quite seriously.

"Well, it's a bit like that. Mizuko-chan collects these stones, and she puts them in places so they change the water flow. She knows how to keep the balance with the river, and all the creeks and streams around here."

"But the stones don't block the water?" Mori asked, still having difficulty with the concept.  
"No, but you could say they block whatever brings the water down a stream."

Mori searched his memory, and came up with a word from his cousin's lessons. "Gravity?"  
"If you like," the man said noncommittally, and Mori finally decided that the subject of the stones was beyond his understanding, and he would be better served to ask other questions.

"Do you know the person who brought those stones to the orchard?"  
"Hm, no I'm afraid that was before my time. When I first saw that place....twelve? Thirteen years ago? It was a ruin already." He shook his head. "Didn't like the feel of it. So I moved on."

"Where do you live now?"  
"I made a house on the river. If you go up from that pool, and follow the tributary, it'll take you to the river. Then it's over the hill, and south a ways. You're welcome to come visit if you've a mind to. It's a challenge with the spring snow melt, but from harvest season on, it's easy enough."

"Thank you," Mori nodded, trying to imagine himself still here, through winter and spring, wondering how Onuma managed it. "Are there any other neighbors around?"

"Eh, no people that I know of. Unless you count the village...." Onuma stopped and turned to look at Mori, who had scuffed to a halt on the path.

"Village?"  
"Just that one down the hill. You must have--." Onuma paused and blinked. "You didn't come up from there?"

Mori looked north, the way Onuma had gestured, barely able to keep himself from breaking into a run then and there. "No. I was lost for three days. There was a road, to the west. I came into the forest there."

"I know that road," Onuma nodded slowly. He gazed off a moment, and then looked back at Mori. A steady, serious stare. "If that's true, if you made it in from there. You must be one tough customer."

"No, I was pretty sure I was going to die a few times," Mori blurted, not even realizing it was the truth until he'd said it. Onuma's look went faintly surprised, and then he burst out in a peal of laughter.

"Hah! You are an interesting one."


	14. Chapter 14

14.

 

"Well I'll be damned." Onuma stopped in view of the cottage, and gave a low whistle. "You clear all that mess from around the house?"

"Not me. It was--a storm, I think. It blew up around the cottage, when I was inside. I came out in the morning, and it was all gone."

Onuma tipped his hat back, and stood surveying the area with his hands on his hips. "Maybe you broke a curse, then. The place sure feels different."

"Curse?" Mori asked.  
"Eh, just a guess I had. Never saw anything but bad luck happen here before, that's for sure." He shook his head, and turned to Mori. "Think it'll be okay if I look inside? I was always curious."

"Please, be my guest," Mori nodded.

They both removed their shoes at the porch, and Onuma gave a polite bob of his head as he entered, offering the customary apology for intruding.

Remembering the boot prints and mud he'd seen when he'd first entered the cottage, Mori asked, "You never came in before?"

"No, I like to look after my health. If a place doesn't want me there, then I don't go." He looked around with a keen, curious eye, though. "Looks like you've done a bunch of cleaning, for somebody not making a claim," crooking an amused brow over at Mori. "Lot nicer than I expected."

"It wasn't so bad to start. The floors were dirty. Mostly, it was dust everywhere." He didn't feel adequate to explaining his impulse to sweep and buff the floors, or clean the windowsills, or scrub the blackened soot from the kitchen chimney. He had done it because it pleased him. Seeing the place clean and cared for pleased him, on a purely aesthetic level. But this wasn't the sort of thing he shared with strangers.

Onuma nodded and admired the bath, and the back room, where Mori had put the altar and his futon. He even offered a useful suggestion about the soaking tub, which Mori had yet to try.  
"Get a rain barrel." He pointed out a stoppered hole in the side of the tub, which was flush against the wall. "Bet you anything, that's a pipe leading outside. You set up a rain barrel leading in, and save yourself a bunch of trips to the well."

It was an excellent suggestion, and Mori thanked him. But what really seemed to interest his visitor, was the kitchen.  
"You don't know what I'd give for space like this," Onuma grinned, taking off his hat, and setting the knapsack he'd been carrying on the counter. "Best I can do is a grill on the side porch. Cleaning up's easy, just dump water everywhere. It's a pain in the rainy season, though."

"Doesn't it snow, where you are?" Mori asked.  
"Yeah. I heat things up on the kotatsu, then. Rice takes forever that way."

"We could cook your fish in here," Mori offered. "All I have is what I found in the cellar. No spices except salt. But there's rice. And some utensils."  
"Don't guess you have charcoal?"  
"Sorry, no. Just wood."

"There is plenty of that around here," Onuma agreed, before giving Mori a sidelong look. "Though, if I were you, I wouldn't go cutting any trees. You can find all the deadwood you'll ever need. But I think this part of the forest takes cutting a bit personally."

"You've had trouble before?" Mori asked, intrigued. In the limited exploring he'd done, he'd thought--a few times--that something felt unusual in the shade and quiet between the trees. But then walking alone in any forest could easily lead one to start imagining things, so he was never sure if it was just him.

"Hm, not me. But now and again I meet someone. You'd be surprised how often people get lost around here. And I've heard some stories." Then he turned and gave Mori a little wink. "Not that I'm trying to spook you, or anything."

"It's all right. Thanks for the advice." Mori answered politely, but he wasn't so sure about that wink, just then.

Onuma chuckled. "You don't look like you spook that easily, anyway."

Mori shrugged and sidestepped the man's gaze, to start pulling out the pots and utensils he'd brought up from the cellar. "I never found that being afraid really helped."

 

He wasn't sure he quite had Onuma's measure yet, but Mori couldn't deny the man knew how to put together a travel pack.

First out was the fish, cleaned and scaled, and wrapped in salted leaves, then curled to fit into short clay pots. So long as the weather was cool, Onuma explained, fish could travel a couple of days this way. In winter, he packed snow into the pots, and the fish was good for a week.

Besides the fish, he carried a tinderbox, a pair of chopsticks and a bowl, a roll of cotton gauze, a glass bottle of some bitter-looking herbal tincture, a larger bottle of homemade plum wine, a compact calligraphy set, a folding knife, a ball of lye soap, a small toothbrush, and handfuls of other sundries.

As he sorted out his pack, he explained how Mori could find the village. Where he could go for supplies, who to ask for, and most importantly, what they took for trade.

"You tell them where you're staying, and they might just give you provisions on credit. I've run into more than one person who got lost looking for that pear orchard of yours. Come next fall, you could probably set yourself up for the year. In the meantime..." he shrugged. "If you don't have money, you could pay them in work. Or firewood. "

Now there was an idea. Mori took a moment and tried to estimate the amount of wood he could get, just cleaning the orchard up. If it would be enough to tide him over for the winter, in trade with the village. Then he wondered just when he'd stopped resisting this kind of fanciful speculation, and started forming plans that could keep him here. It felt so strange, to actually let himself want something. He hadn't done it in so long, he'd forgotten the sensation.

As if picking up on his earlier train of his thought, Onuma put in, "Y'know, pear wood. I bet the smokehouse would give a pretty penny for that. Apple wood is best, but pear might do."

"Is there a way to transport it?" Mori asked.  
"Go talk to Fukuo-san. He's got draft horses, and a cart. He'll move anything you want, if he decides you're all right."

"All right?"  
Onuma gave a wry grin. "He doesn't take to everybody. Most folks don't take to him, to be honest. But I bet he helps you out. Least he won't be timid about coming up here."

Mori didn't need to ask, to know that most people would be.

**

When he had reached a certain age, the head priest at the temple had taken Mori aside, and offered him an important piece of advice.

It was permissible and polite, the man said, to accept a strong drink if someone offered. But unless he was among trusted friends, Mori should take care never to get drunk.

"Wine has a way of getting the secrets out of a man," the monk warned him. "From his talk, and his actions. We all have secrets that are safer kept to ourselves. And there are always going to be those people who wait for the chance to use those secrets against us."

The advice came at a time when Mori was increasingly conscious of the scrutiny he'd grown up under. Because of his name, and his upbringing in the temple, and most particularly for his relationship to his cousin.

Mitsukuni was an important person, destined to become much more important as he got older. And Mori was just reaching the age where he realized, that when most people looked at him, what they saw was not a boy, but a personal relationship to a future head of state.

And the head priest's advice, he knew, was not merely for his own personal benefit. Everything Mori did, everything he said, would reflect on his upbringing, the temple he lived in, and on his cousin. And the advice about drinking only reinforced that Mori must, under all circumstances, remain mindful of that. 

In the time after Mori had left the temple, fleeing the city and the only friends he'd ever known (though they certainly wouldn't have recognized him as a friend anymore by then), Mori modified that advice, to a general cautionary measure. Don't drink at all, unless he was among people he trusted. And never, ever get drunk in the presence of a stranger.

So when the fish was on the grill, and the cork came out of Onuma's wine bottle, as Mori figured it eventually might, he accepted only one small cup in the spirit of good hosting, and sipped it as slowly as possible through the afternoon.

He could tell this was not lost on Onuma, who seemed to keep a sharp eye on everything, behind his easygoing demeanor. From time to time, the man would glance at the level in Mori's cup, and give a small smile to himself. But he made no comment on it, through the course of the meal and conversation. He himself put away a few small cups, but Mori had the impression he was taking his own precautions against intoxication.

In regards to the fish, however, Mori had no such constraints.   
"This is delicious," he repeated, accepting his third helping. "I can't tell you how grateful I am, that you've shared this."

"Well I figured, anybody who made it out here long enough to get those stones moved would've had it pretty rough," Onuma grinned. "To be honest, I didn't expect to find you still on your feet. But hey, at least now I know what to bring, if I need a favor from Morinozuka-san."

Mori set down his chopsticks, thinking of the fish, and all the advice, and Onuma gamely helping him move stones all morning. "Actually, I owe you several favors by now."

"Not at all," Onuma shook his head. "You being here is already a big favor for me. Every spring, every rainy season, the river floods me out. Mizuko-chan said a long time ago, that it wouldn't be so bad, if that pear orchard was getting watered. I'm grateful you finally came along and moved those stones."

"Why didn't you move them, if it was a problem for you?"  
"If it was that simple, I might have. But Mizuko-chan said only the caretaker of this land could return those stones to her. I guess that was the deal, when they were borrowed. Since I didn't see myself accepting the care of this place, I was pretty much stuck waiting until somebody did. So--," he raised his cup and toasted Mori. "I thank you for being here, and hope you'll stay and prosper."

"I humbly appreciate your welcome," Mori recited, returning the toast. "I hope I can be a good neighbor for you."

Onuma tossed back the last of his drink, giving a focused glance toward Mori, from the corner of his eye.  
"Say," he started, setting his cup down. "I'm not a trained doctor or anything, but I've patched up a few bad cuts in my time. You want me to take a look at that arm, for you?"

Mori looked down at the bandaging, debating the wisdom of letting a relative stranger poke around at his wound. He'd more or less gotten used to the itching and aching being a constant fact of life, but he was concerned that the deepest part of the cut still hadn't closed yet.

"I was due to clean it soon, anyway," he said. "If you want to look at it, I don't mind."


	15. Chapter 15

15.

It was a relief to see that even with a few drinks in him, Onuma was a serious and attentive nurse. He made sure to wash his hands with his lye soap, and some of the water Mori had heated for tea, before having Mori remove the bandage, near the window in the kitchen.

"Hm," he frowned, leaning in to inspect the scraped skin and the cut. "I see what you meant by worrisome. Looks like this thing bled buckets. You've done good keeping it clean." He gently touched the skin around the deepest part of the cut, and shook his head. "But you've been using the arm too much. The scar up here isn't going to be pretty."

"I tried not to overdo it," Mori said. "Not much choice, though."  
"Sure wish I'd seen this, before we moved all those stones." He stepped back and reached for some items in his travel pack. "I've got something here you can try, it should help keep the cut closed." He popped open a tin box, and removed a number of sticking-plasters, from a white paper wrapping. Unlike the rectangular ones Mori was used to seeing however, these were cut to an hourglass shape.

"Butterfly bandages," Onuma explained. "Not as good as stitches, but the same idea. But first--" He held up the ball of lye soap, and a bowl of boiled water. "You want to wash it, or you want me to?"

"Stings just as much either way," Mori said, with a feeling of tired inevitability. "I'll wash it."

It was hard to say which hurt worse; the lye soap or the iodine. But Mori was an old hand by now at gritting his teeth and bearing it, and he was forced to admit to himself, there was a certain amount of pride at stake, with Onuma watching him this time. He refused to flinch or hiss, with the man's eyes on him, and took a tiny measure of satisfaction from the glimmer of respect he caught in Onuma's look afterward.

"You've got a high tolerance for pain. That's good. You wouldn't believe all the grown men I've seen carry on, while I've patched them up." He shook his head. "They don't seem to realize, the more you get worked up, the more it seems to hurt."

He took out the glass bottle Mori had spotted earlier, explaining that the tincture inside would help the wound heal, and take away the stinging and inflammation. 

"You help a lot of people around here?" Mori asked, as Onuma poured the tincture in small drops across the cut.

"I don't go around looking for them. But if I run across someone, or if I hear something, I do what I can for them." He leaned back and set the bottle aside, with an expression that wasn't really a smile. 

"You might say I'm working off a debt. I did some selfish things, a long time ago. And it's too late to make up for them. So instead, I try to be useful now."

Mori pondered this, as Onuma pulled out the odd-shaped plasters and began laying them over the deep cut, carefully bringing the edges of the skin together.

"I consider this a great help. The people you've found must have all been very lucky."

Onuma stilled with his fingers on Mori's arm, and looked up. For a moment, his eyes behind his silver glasses were dark and serious, and Mori was briefly very conscious of the quiet in the kitchen, and the counter top pressing into his lower back. He felt, for just an instant, that the man's proximity had pinned him in place.

That was the moment when Mori's instinct rang in the verdict on Onuma. Telling him it was fine to accept this stranger, and perfectly all right to like him. But trusting him absolutely might not work out so well.

And then the moment shifted; Onuma drew back, and his eyes were friendly and not so serious, and Mori felt he could draw breath in the space between them again.

"Do your best not to use that arm for a couple days, eh? Change the butterfly bandages once a day, put a few drops of that antiseptic on, like I did. If you're not outside doing anything, I'd say let it air out."

Mori nodded and thanked him again, and several minutes later, seeing that the afternoon was starting to wane, asked Onuma if he'd be interested in having tea, and staying on for dinner.  
"The futons are still musty," he admitted, "but you're welcome to one, for a night."

The invitation arose out of the common hospitality of his upbringing; the temple had always been open to visitors, pilgrims, and those travelers who'd discovered night coming on before they'd found regular lodgings. 

Like the altar in his bedroom, being able to offer space to a guest for the night was simply one of those hallmarks of home, for Mori. And regardless of how his future at this cottage worked out, Mori wanted to be able to say he'd at least tried out the idea of making a home for himself somewhere.

He had a strong feeling Onuma might take the invitation differently, but Mori chose to not let that stop him from offering.

"Tea, eh?" Onuma smiled, and began returning loose items to his travel pack. "Here I was hoping you might help me empty that wine bottle. Less weight to haul back."

"It's excellent wine. I'm sorry I'm not much of a drinker. But if you'd like to finish it, or store it here...." He trailed off discreetly, to let Onuma know his options were open.

"And if I got drunk enough to ask if Morinozuka-san were lonely?" Onuma's tone stayed light, but he kept his eyes averted to his pack, and his hands just busy enough. "Whether he cared to have someone share a quilt with him, for a night...."

"I wouldn't be angry if Onuma-san asked," Mori replied calmly. "But I would have to apologize, for being unable to accept that offer. Onuma-san would still be welcome to a quilt of his own."

"Hm," Onuma nodded, and looked placidly around the kitchen, letting a long thoughtful quiet spin out between them.

"You know it's interesting. How much you can learn about a man, by the place he chooses to live. Myself? I like to live on the river, and watch it go by, looking different every moment. I take the world as it comes to me, you could say. And when it moves on, I let it go."

He turned then, and folded his arms, turning a keen, appreciative eye to Mori. Still friendly, Mori was relieved to see, and perhaps a bit more honest than previously.  
"I think Morinozuka-san is different, though. You've chosen a place where your roots can sink in. Where things grow, but don't change so much. And if you'll forgive me for speculating. But I bet once you decide to hold on to something, that will be when you decide to never let it go."

"That might be true," Mori allowed. "I was never at liberty to hang on to things before. But I think, if I could put down roots...." He looked out the kitchen window, to the east side of the clearing, where the shadows of the forest trees stretched long and thin, and the front rows of the orchard caught the afternoon light in its thick, tangled arms. 

"I wouldn't want to pull them up. I'd rather wait, and be sure I could stay."


	16. Chapter 16

16.

 

Mori told himself he wasn't luring the fox, with the piece of dried beef in his pocket. Only exchanging favors with it. The favor to him being the labor saved, when the fox stopped tracking mud on the floors. The fox may find a trip across the stream disagreeable, but he would do it the favor of sharing some dried beef.

On the off-chance they came across the water spirit in a helpful mood, Mori had brought along a favor for it as well.

Needless to say, the fox stayed close on his trail, going down the high ground path around the orchard, and back into the woods where the stream widened out. But as he'd half expected it might, the fox balked at the stream's edge, where Mori's long legs enabled him to cross to the other side.

It paced up and down the short stretch of gravel bank, glancing at Mori, and then at the running water. A few times, it tested the stream with one foot, but then backed away quickly, and sniffed along the bank, seeking some alternative.

"It isn't deep," Mori pointed out, squatting down by a rock to wait. And indeed, the water was no higher than the fox's knees, at this part. There were much shallower spots, further down, where the fox would barely have wet the tops of its feet, but that wouldn't serve Mori's purpose too well.

"You'll only get a little wet, and then you can shake it off, and have a snack." The fox left off pacing the bank, when Mori pulled the dried beef from his pocket. "See? I brought this to give you."

The fox stretched its neck out, sniffing across the water, as if it could summon the treat by sheer interest alone. With its attention focused entirely on Mori's hand, it made three steps into the water, before suddenly registering the wet, and backing up to the bank with a little whine.

"I wonder how you got this far, if you dislike water so much?" Mori didn't want to be cruel, or tease the creature. Maybe the water was too cold for it. He could always try moving down to the shallower area, and settle for the fox rinsing off a little.

"You should put a hook in your bait, if you want to catch it." The water spirit emerged with a trickle and a shimmer, unfolding itself from the streambed, to sit with its knees drawn up in the running water, near Mori.

Mori had already gathered that Mizuko-chan's view of living things was loosely categorized into person, plant, fish, and fish with fur or wings. So the suggestion, while somewhat appalling, didn't surprise him really.

"I'm not trying to catch him. I was hoping he wanted to cross the water."  
"That fish won't swim," was the water spirit's comment.

"Not at all?" Mori asked. "How do they cross water in the forest?"  
"Jumping." The water spirit watched the fox, who had taken a seat on the gravel bank, watching it right back.

"He sees you," Mori said, curious. He had long thought some animals sensed ghosts and haunted places, but he'd never observed one in the presence of a ghost or an elemental spirit like this before.

The fox sat with its head cocked, one ear pricked to the sound of conversation, looking between Mori, and where the water spirit sat with the stream eddying around its elbows and knees.

"Fish in the water can lure it in," Mizuko-chan remarked. "It jumps in to chase." The water spirit leaned forward, a sinuous shivery twist of limbs, and stretched out on its front, propped up on its elbows. The fox came to attention at the movement, forgetting Mori to focus entirely on the motion in the water. It lowered its head and tail, and crouched, bright eyes intent on the water spirit.

"Can you lure him in?" Mori asked.  
"This one's marked."

Mori frowned and looked at the fox. "You mean the mud?"  
"Mud." The spirit dismissed the suggestion with a backhanded splash at Mori. "Water won't change a don't-touch mark."

He'd heard the spirit use that term before, but Mori had yet to understand what exactly it was, or to spot the mark for himself. According to the spirit, many--though not all--of the trees in the forest had Don't-Touch marks. There were also Don't-Touch stones, and Don't-Touch paths, and in one case, a Don't-Touch pine cone which had sat on a rock ledge above the pool behind the orchard, for at least the two years he'd been in residence.

It seemed a goodly portion of the cottage property was similarly marked. The well, most of the orchard, and the cottage itself were all somehow designated Don't-Touch. Upon learning this, Mori had studied the well and the house intensively, hoping to understand what it might mean, or what effect such a mark might have. But he'd discovered nothing which particularly jumped out at him.

This was the first he'd heard of any sentient being marked Don't-Touch.

"I still don't see any mark," he told the spirit, ducking his head and squinting at the fox.

"You don't notice currents."

Mori knew by now that when the water spirit talked of currents, it didn't merely mean the swirls and eddies visible in a stream or pool. The spirit was capable of seeing a water current in potential, where no water had yet run. What Mori might--as Onuma had said--comprehend as gravity. Or chi, going by the definition of his Budo sensei, at the temple.

He had thought it odd, that he could see ghosts and spirits, but not the marks which were so plain to Mizuko-chan. But putting them in a class with Mizuko-chan's 'currents' gave him a different view to consider. He couldn't see gravity or chi, either. But he could feel gravity. And on rare occasions, while deep in meditation, or wholly focused on his kata, he'd been conscious of something inside him, in sync with his breath and heartbeat, moving through his limbs, lungs, and consciousness.

Sensei had said Mori could direct that force, into the strokes of his sword, or the thrust of his shinai. He said when the ceremonial archers loosed their arrows out in the temple courtyard at New Year's, it was chi they released, a pure focused force that sang through the air, and dispelled any malingering spirit of the dead year, clearing the atmosphere so good fortune could come.

But Mori was pragmatic. He was also big for his age, and physically strong, and to be honest, he'd never felt he could quite grasp that energy. He worked hard to perfect his form, his balance, to control the variation of his movements down to the millimeter. And though sometimes, once in a rare while, he would feel that flicker of something extra, gathering in his chest, in the pit of his stomach, he could never direct it. Never control it or release it at will. It always slipped away from him, gone in a hard breath, or a shift of his foot, or a flick of his wrist.

Sensei had said his body was still growing, and to give it time. When he'd reached his full height, and his spirit had matured, then he should understand better. When he needed that energy, when his kata was practiced for more than the sake of discipline and form, he would find a way to grasp it.

"You mean if I had to fight someone for real?" Mori had asked. At the time, the only purpose he could imagine fighting for, was in defense of his cousin, or the temple, or the city. But even that took a long stretch of his imagination, given that his entire life the city had been peaceful, and the temple especially sheltered.

"Perhaps," Sensei had answered. "But there's another purpose, to all that you're learning. When you have to put that purpose to the test, then you'll know."

Though Mori had certainly been tested in the time since then, he had yet to encounter the purpose Sensei and his other teachers had mentioned.

First, he had concluded that his purpose must have been canceled. When everything he'd been brought up to believe, to serve, to live for, was severed from him. The accusations leveled against him had cut him off from his future, and from every association of his past.

"It would be easier on everyone, if you were dead." That was what Megumi-sama had told him when he was imprisoned, and at the time, that was what Mori had believed.

But that bizarre woman he'd met on the city bridge, or whatever she actually was, had said something different. "I think you'll be a lot more useful alive, than dead. You have it in you, to do interesting things." Leading him to hope all over again, that maybe there was in fact some greater purpose to life, just not the sort he'd been aimed toward up to then.

When that strange man had barged onto the cottage property with his hounds, Mori had wondered then. Was this a test of purpose? Was he about to discover something here? The slickness of his palms on the shinai, and the flutter in his stomach had told him, maybe. His immediate, powerful distrust of the stranger had told him too.

But then the moment had defused itself, and the stranger had retreated for whatever reason, and Mori hadn't found out.

Maybe just being there, he thought, watching the fox's whiskers twitching at the water spirit. Maybe that was all he was supposed to do. Leave the right door open at the right time, and guard it. Give a creature like this a safe place to hide and recover.

And maybe a bath, if it would let him.

"He looks like he wants to play," he remarked to the spirit, who was flicking droplets of water into the air, and watching the fox's reactions.

"Young fish always want to play," the spirit answered.  
"You can tell how old he is?"

"Young fish. Old eyes." The spirit leaned in close, bringing its chin almost level with the water. "Old mark."

"Is that unusual?" Mori asked, having always believed that most things were the same age all over.  
"There are stranger things."

Mori was thinking he really couldn't argue with that, just at the moment that the fox, having apparently tired of watching the shimmering creature just out of its reach, leapt for the middle of the stream, splashing in with all four feet.

The water spirit twisted away at the last second, throwing out ripples and wavelets, doubling around in a serpentine curve, and showering the fox with water from behind.

The fox pranced and snapped at the water drops in mid-air, flicking its tail about. It gathered its feet, and bounded after the spirit, following its darting, dodging motion through the water, with an expression Mori could only describe as happy abandon.

For a moment, the spirit went under, gliding and shining just above the stream bed. The fox lost track of it briefly, and pawed at the water, ears tilted sharply forward. Then when it spotted the quicksilver flash, it yipped and jumped, up over the water, a sleek arc of orange and white, tongue lolling, and as it landed, Mori realized he was laughing, with the stream raining all around him, and his sides aching, he was laughing like never in his life.

The water spirit came up in a burst of spray, wetting Mori and the fox all over, and the fox jumped for the bank at Mori's side, shaking itself out from ears to tail, huffing as if it too had laughed itself out of breath.

"Okay, okay, here," Mori chuckled, holding out the dried beef, and wiping his face with his sleeve. The fox butted its wet nose up into his hand, sniffling and then licking at Mori's fingers, before drawing back and neatly nipping the meat from his fingers.

"You look clean now." The spirit sat in the middle of the stream, solemn as always, looking not at the fox, but at Mori, who swiped his dripping hair back, and grinned, still feeling the effervescence of laughter in him.

"I guess I got a washing too. Thanks." Then he remembered the other thing he had brought. "Oh, I found something you might like." He dug in his pocket, and produced a broken string of five amber-colored glass beads.

"They turned up, when I was digging." He'd figured them for prayer beads, but hadn't yet found the rest of the string. Having little use for only five glass beads, he'd rinsed them off in well water and saved them for the water spirit, who'd shown a partiality for shiny objects in the past.

"They came up with your plants," the spirit said, leaning forward and eying the string.  
"In the vegetable plot," Mori nodded. The spirit never explained how it knew where he found things, and he'd never seen it venture past the irrigation inlet to the orchard. But it could always spot the origin of stones he'd found in the forest, or near the well, or in the vegetable plot.

"You've said words on those stones."  
"I think they were prayer beads," Mori explained. "I didn't say any prayers with them, but some other person might have. Should I leave them here for you?"

"Don't need them here. Later, I'll show you." It looked over to the fox, who, having completed its snack, was licking its coat back down. "Your fish wants to sleep soon."

"Oh?" Mori glanced down, and saw the fox was still grooming, but its eyelids were drooping at a sleepy half-mast. At the same moment, with a soft plunk, like a stone dropping into a pool, the water spirit disappeared.

"Hm." Mori tucked the beads back into his pocket, and made to push himself up from the bank. "I guess that means we're done here. You want to follow me back?"

The fox blinked slowly up at him, and then rose to its feet, a little unsteadily. "I'll show you where to cross, so you don't get wet again," Mori promised.

**

Once back at the cottage, Mori had headed off to his bedroom to change clothes, and the fox followed slowly up the porch steps afterward.

When he came back out, he found it curled next to the table, on the blue wool sweater he'd taken off at breakfast that morning, and forgot to put away.

Mori stood over the table, and the fox. "That's my favorite sweater, you know."  
The fox folded its feet in closer, and tucked its nose under its tail. "Since you're clean, I'll let it go," Mori said softly. "But just this once."

**


	17. Chapter 17

"Okay, I hope you understand this," Mori sighed.

He was kneeling by the low, open window of his bedroom, with the fox sitting at attention nearby. It was early morning, still cool, and Mori was hoping to get a head start on the hot day to come.

"I have to close the front door, when I go. But you can use this window, if you need to get inside, for some reason." He put a small rice ball on the windowsill, and pointed to it. "This window, understood?"

The fox looked at Mori's fingers, then at the rice ball. It stood, and padded over to the windowsill to have a sniff. "Good," Mori told it. "That's right, you can have that."

After an extensive inspection, the fox gave a last resounding sniff, then turned and trotted back out the bedroom door, through the hall, and to the front door. A few seconds later, a single sharp yip commanded Mori's attention.

Mori sighed again, got up and went to the front room.

"I won't be back by lunch. That's why I'm showing you how to get in now."  
The fox gazed up at him, looking for all the world as if it were listening.

"I'll leave you some food inside, and some outside. But I really hope you won't follow me. I don't think you'll like the village."

For an answer, he got a wide yawn, and a brushy tail swishing the floor.

Mori looked around, growing anxious. He'd considered postponing his supply trip several times already. But he knew that wouldn't make things any easier. 

He knew, intellectually, that the fox would be fine by itself. That it had fended for itself all its life so far. But this was his first trip away since the fox's arrival, and Mori was aware he was not taking it well.

"Why don't I show you the window from the outside, just to make sure you get it."

 

Half an hour later, well down the broad trail to the village, he was still talking to the fox.

"I shouldn't have taught you to follow me. That was unwise." 

Worse than unwise, it was irresponsible. The fox had now learned that accompanying Mori on long hikes through the forest included interesting diversions and snacks, since Mori couldn't manage to resist sharing the lunch he usually brought on his hikes. The fox never begged food from him, or made any fuss when he ate. It simply sat there, neatly composed, watching him with bright, interested eyes, until Mori finally broke.

And now that it had learned to follow, there was no telling what kind of trouble would ensue. What if it followed him into the village? What if it got lost there, or someone stumbled on it, and thought it was a scavenger, come to upset households and rubbish bins? God. What if it discovered rubbish bins?

Mori thought he might be edging into hysteria, on this last point. The fox had never troubled over any scraps in the cottage, leftover food in the kitchen, or anything he didn't offer it directly on a plate, or from his hand.

Hm. Maybe that was his error, with the windowsill. "I should have put that rice ball on a plate. You just didn't understand." 

He looked around, and spotted the fox leaping into the underbrush, after a butterfly. And for the dozenth time that morning, he sighed.

 

"Please understand now, because this is very important." Mori had stepped off the trail, behind a large rock, at a wide rutted turnout used by traveling carts. They were just a few minutes from the village, and Mori's anxiety had reached its peak.

He knelt down in front of the fox, and set his pack aside. "I realize I have no business giving you orders. But I would like it very much, if you would wait here. It isn't safe for you, where I'm going. I promise I won't be too long. I'll come back, do you understand that?"

Truly, he thought, the fox's listening pose was uncanny.

"Stay," Mori told it. "Please. As a favor." The fox yawned, long and wide, and turned a definite hopeful look toward his pack.

"All right. Let's try this." He opened his pack, and dug for the box of rice he'd brought, and a bowl. He poured a generous amount of water from his canteen, into the bowl, and then took the lid off the rice. Lastly, he untied the blue wool sweater from the straps of his pack (because even in June, it wasn't a bad idea to keep an extra layer of clothing handy), and after ruefully shaking his head, he folded it on the ground.

"You can have lunch, and rest here. And I'll be back."

The fox bypassed the food, the water, and went straight for the sweater, and sat.  
"That's good. That's very good. You should be fine right there."

Ten steps down the trail, Mori turned, waiting to see the fox trotting after him. But nothing was there.

A minute or so later, he stopped again, ready to swear he'd heard it sneeze off in the bushy ferns, to his left. But it was just a bird, fluttering madly.

Entering the village, he knew he'd start drawing stares if he kept looking over his shoulder. So he concentrated his gaze straight ahead, and did his best to walk normally, while keeping his peripheral senses keyed for any hint that the fox had come running up behind.

Leaving aside his early days of traveling, back when he jumped at every shadow, it was possibly the most nerve-wracking trip of his life. And he had clearly forgotten all about the basic rules of trade in small communities. That even the simplest transactions never happened quickly, and everyone he dealt with had to take the chance to catch him up on all the latest goings-on.

By now, everyone had accepted his generally taciturn character, and people seldom expected much of him, in the way of discourse. But not having to talk didn't excuse him from listening, To the news regarding Hito-sama's great-grandchildren. To the basket-weaver's views on the state of the village roads. To the lament about miserable leaky roofs, from the man at the smokehouse.

And while by some miraculous grace of composure, Mori was able to remain courteous, attentive, and to nod in all the right places, on the inside he was grinding his teeth, pulling his hair until the roots cried for mercy, and begging for this to please, please be over before untold catastrophe came crashing down. In the form of the fox, darting across the street and under the wheels of a passing ox-cart, or racing through the fish monger's, to an accompanying chorus of outrage, or chased by the village dogs to its last stand on the river bank.

"All right, so that's two dozen strawberries, four melons--you sure you don't want to put these up for a prize, at the festival? I'm not sure I feel right about taking them off your hands...."

_Please just take them off my hands, so I can go,_ Mori begged, in the privacy of his thoughts. 

What he actually said was, "Arai-san is too generous with his praise. But I only hope to trade them, if Arai-san would care to name a price he feels is fair."

The grocer shook his head, smiling. "I appreciate that Morinozuka-san is too well-mannered to haggle properly. But I fear that refinement gets in the way of him getting the most for what he offers. A man with prize melons like this should be a little more reluctant to part with them."

Mori had gradually come to grasp in theory, that he could bargain and haggle his way to a tidy profit with the goods he brought. At least, that's what everyone kept telling him. But he'd truly never seen the point. He'd planted the vegetable plot strictly out of a desire to see things growing on the land next to his cottage. What he couldn't eat himself, he brought down to the village. 

Because his acquaintances in the village were honest people, they insisted on giving him fair trade for what he offered. But this view of fair trade occasionally brought Mori and the traders to differences of opinion. Mori felt trading a surplus of produce for a surplus of something else rather defeated the purpose, and the idea of one melon being worth substantially more than another melon was quite lost on him.

And, as a personal matter, he hated bargaining.

He was also, on this particular day, intensely eager to conclude his business in the village, and leave. He'd already spent an hour with his nerves drawn to a screaming edge, and wouldn't be able to relax until he was back up the forest trail, and able to find the fox.

But at the same time, he recognized that Arai-san--being a man who took pride in fair dealing--would not be happy, if he felt he'd failed to give Mori a good trade. If he were to make a profit on the melons, which was too much above what he'd given for them, he would feel he'd done Mori a serious discourtesy. It was just this quality of character which led Mori to deal with him in the first place, and it certainly wouldn't do now, to treat Arai-san's concerns lightly.

There were only two ways to remedy the situation. One, Mori could browse Arai-san's current stock for something of equal value to the melons. Whether he needed it or not. Two, he could postpone the trade, and take a credit from Arai-san, against goods he might need in the future. 

The only downside there, was that Mori would return through the summer with more of his garden surplus, so the credit for the melons would most likely stay on the books. And then in fall, he'd be transporting bushels of pears, which would be taken on credit for all he'd need through the winter. And Arai-san doubtless wouldn't want to carry a long-term debt on his books.

Having decided the first option was the more considerate one, Mori took a glance around Arai-san's shop. "Would it be all right, if I trade the melons, for one of those rugs over there?"

Arai-san looked in the direction Mori indicated, to a wooden table piled with roughly woven cotton rugs. "Those old things?" To Mori's dismay, the man chuckled. "I guess I could give you the whole stack, and it might be even. Throw in a trip up for Fukuo-san to deliver them."

Mori smiled and bit his tongue until it hurt. "Four of the rugs?"  
"Eh. I could take one melon for that, I guess."  
Mori refrained from pointing out that his melons were not made of gold, they did not contain precious gemstones, or possess extraordinary properties, and that he'd done nothing to merit ownership of them beyond planting a few seeds, and keeping the pests and weeds away.

He did reflect, far in the back of his mind, that the melons were turning out to be such a nuisance to get rid of, that maybe he shouldn't bother with them anymore. And then he recalled, as he sometimes did at moments like this, that only two years ago he might have done some fairly undignified things, just to get a melon to eat, and that he should be grateful to have such burdens to carry now.

Through all of this, Mori kept his polite smile. "Arai-san is an honorable and generous person. If he insists on giving me four rugs for one poor melon, I will humbly accept his better judgment. If he wished to take the other three melons off my hands and spare me having to carry them back, I would only ask that he permit me to return later, to accept payment."

"If Morinozuka-san wishes to return later, then perhaps in a day or so, I could give him a cash value?"  
Mori pretended to deliberate the offer, out of courtesy, but in truth he never wanted money. Money had a way of getting lost, or tempting a person to spend for unnecessary things, or tempting other people to steal. He'd seen it in the temple, and he'd seen it on his travels. Money was not a good thing to get accustomed to.

"I'm sure Arai-san would give a better deal than I could ask, but I was hoping, if he might see fit to set aside some winter garments, when they come into stock this fall? I'll be in need of a new coat, and some gloves by then."

The man looked at the melons a bit wryly. "Of course I'm happy to do that, but Morinozuka-san should know, for the price of three melons, he can get a much finer coat made, than what I can offer."

"I don't need a fine coat, just a warm one," Mori answered honestly. "I'm not careful enough with coats to have a fine one."

Arai-san laughed, and raised his hands in surrender. "You're too easy to please, you know that? All right, I'll give you four rugs now, and you can come in the fall and have your pick of coats and scarves, and whatever else you wish."

Mori thought he'd probably have to set a whole day aside, to work that deal out to everyone's satisfaction, but at least it got him free for now.  
"I'm always pleased to do business with Arai-san, and I thank you very much for your time."

Once back on the trail to the forest, Mori walked as fast as a full pack, a basket of goods, and four rugs would allow. He reached the rock where he'd left the fox, staggered around the back, saw the empty box of rice, the half-empty water bowl, and the fox, just stretching out from its nap to greet him.

"You." Mori leaned against the rock and tried to catch his breath. "You have no idea."

He loosened his basket from his shoulders, along with the pack, and set them on the ground before going to his knees, and then stretching out on his back.

The fox stepped off his sweater, which had now acquired pricklings of leaves, twigs, and fox fur, and came around to sniff his hand, laying limp on the ground at his side, his head, and the finally his pack.

It spent quite awhile sniffing the pack.  
"Yes," Mori told it, once he'd got enough air in him to be coherent. "I got dried sardines. But you won't like them. They're salty."

The fox continued sniffing for a bit, and then came and sat on its haunches, so it could look directly down at Mori.

"I got you a rug. So I can have my sweater back. I got four rugs. You can have your pick."  
The fox dropped one ear to the side, and rustled its tail in the leaves.  
"You just had all my lunch. If you wanted to carry the rugs, I wouldn't turn you down."  
The fox listened very carefully to all he said, and then leaned down and butted its nose into the palm of his hand.

"Later. I'll let you try one sardine. But I promise you won't like it. They're at the bottom of the pack, anyway."

The fox sighed, and stretched out its forelegs, so it could lie next to Mori on the forest floor.


	18. Chapter 18

18.

 

It was a bright hot afternoon, and Mori had left off pulling weeds from the vegetable plot for the day. The fox was stretched out on the front porch, enjoying its afternoon doze, slitting one amber eye open to watch Mori, hatless and stripped to the waist, douse himself in a bucket of water from the well.

Out in the baking sun, the icy water trickling across his scalp, and rippling down his shoulders and chest felt every bit as good as Mori had been fantasizing for the past two hours. A good reward for persevering with the weed-pulling, on a day so still and hot that the earth baked under his sandals, and even the birds kept to the forest shade.

He swiped the water from his eyes, and ruffled his hair vigorously with both hands, before lowering the bucket a second time.

"Sure you won't have a bath?" he offered the fox in passing, tipping the bucket to refill its water bowl, and his own drinking pitcher.

The fox rolled on its side, stretching to its fullest length like a small furry log, and yawned. Deciding he might as well follow its example, Mori sat on the top step, legs stretching down, and lay back on the porch next to it, folding his arms up behind his head.

He wished he'd had the foresight to prepare some cold watermelon. It would've gone a long way toward dispelling the heaviness of the air, and cooling him off from the inside. But the only way to properly chill a melon out here at this time of year, was to put it down the well overnight, or else hike up to a shaded mountain creek and leave it there for a few hours.

At this point, both methods were too much effort. All he could do was lie still as possible and sip water, and periodically spill it on himself, and wait for evening to bring some relief.

He closed his eyes and listened to the cicadas buzzing, off in the underbrush, and wondered if it was worth the trouble to get up and get a fan. "I don't guess you'd care to fetch my fan?" he mumbled to the fox, but got only a faint sigh in reply.

"Hnn. Don't blame you." Waiting for a breeze was less work.

For awhile he went drifting off in a dozy half-dream involving tall glasses of cold tea, with beads of condensation rolling down the sides; bowls of frosty melon, and shaved ice, and the glassy notes of a windchime rippling the air like water drops in a cool pond.

Somewhere outside that decadent scenario, he heard the fox snuffle and sigh, rousing itself very reluctantly, it sounded like. It stood, with a faint scrape of claws on the porch, and scratched itself halfheartedly, before making a soft breathy whine next to Mori's head.

"If it's not a rainstorm coming, I don't want to know," he said, not bothering to open his eyes. The fox butted him in the temple with a damp nose, and then he heard it huff, and the swift click of its claws as it hurried into the cottage.

Curiosity barely overcame his lassitude, just enough to make him roll to his side, raise his head and squint into the deeper shade indoors. But he was soon roused more fully, by the scuff of approaching footsteps in the clearing.

"Well aren't you a sight for sore eyes," Onuma chuckled, hiking up the path to the steps, eying Mori's sprawling, half-dressed state. "If I'd known you spent your days like this, I'd come by more often."

"Whatever you're thinking about, it's too hot for that," Mori said around a yawn, shoving himself up, and arming the sweat off his forehead, before glancing around for his shirt.

Reaching the shade of the porch, Onuma pulled his straw hat off, and fanned himself with the brim, leaning heavily against the porch post. "Hate to say it, but I think you're right. And here I thought it would be cooler, up on this hill."

Mori noticed his hair was dark with sweat, and from the neck up, his skin had the bright flush of heat exertion. "Have a seat," he offered. "I'll get some more water."

While Onuma sighed and dropped down on the porch, shucking his ever-present travel pack, and pinching his clinging shirt out from his skin, trying to billow some air through it, Mori went and dumped the tepid water from the pitcher back in the well, and drew up a bucket of fresh, cold water.

He found his work shirt where he'd left it on the well wall, and tugged it on, tying it loosely in front, before heading back to the porch.

"Just a second, I'll get a cup," he mentioned, setting the pitcher next to Onuma.

"If you've got a bowl, I brought some strawberries."  
"Cold strawberries?" Mori asked hopefully. It was Onuma, who'd given him the idea of chilling melon in his well, last summer. Only his technique was to wrap the melon in one of his fishing nets, and lower it into a deep shaded river pool, near his barge home.

"Eh, maybe not anymore. It was too hot to hurry here."  
"Understandable," Mori shrugged, kicking off his sandals, on his way into the cottage.

In the kitchen, he encountered the fox, stretched out on the flagstone floor, just as it had been on the porch. "It's fine," he told it. "He's a neighbor. You can come back out, if you want."

The fox flicked an ear at him in passing, but that was all.

**

"For what it's worth, I think the village has the worst of it," Onuma told him, pouring more water on the handkerchief he was using for a compress, and placing it on the back of his neck. "The heat sits in that valley for days. At night the mosquitoes come out, and you can't buy a breeze down there."

Mori picked a strawberry off his plate, and twisted the stalk off the top. "What do people do?"  
"They camp on the river, head up for the mountains." Onuma grinned. "You ever want to get a good bargain, come to town when the tradesmen are trying to unload their stock, so they can head off on vacation."

The strawberries weren't as cold as he would've liked, but they were big, and just the right combination of tart and sweet. Purely out of habit, Mori had brought an extra dish out, to share with the fox, but it must have been content with napping on the kitchen floor. Which might have been a degree or two cooler than the porch, come to think of it.

"Is that how you got these?" Mori asked, nodding to the fruit.  
Onuma finished his water, and refilled the cup. "Not exactly," he smiled crookedly. "I helped a couple with an overturned boat, upriver. They hit some rapids, and all their provisions went sailing. I didn't want to take anything, but they insisted."

"This was today?" said Mori.  
"Early, around sunrise."  
"And you came all this way, to share?"

"I remembered you liked them." Onuma's grin wasn't flirtatious for once, but it seemed a bit too casual to Mori.  
"It's the middle of a heat wave."

"Well. I thought I'd see if you had plans for the evening."  
Mori might have harbored some suspicion at this, but honestly it was too hot to harbor anything. "I'd planned on being cooler. That's about it. Why?"

"I saw something, down at the river. Thought it might interest you."

Coming from Onuma, this wasn't an idle observation. But a trip to the river in the evening most likely meant a night spent at Onuma's barge. And while he wasn't averse to the idea in general--for all his occasional teasing, Onuma was a good host and an outstanding cook--Mori had the fox to be concerned about now. He didn't like the thought of leaving it overnight, and even worse was the thought that it might try to follow them, and get lost because it was too wary of Onuma to follow closely enough.

"What was it?" he asked, trying to get a little more information before committing himself.

At that point, Mori was sitting propped against the wall by the front door, while Onuma was leaning back against the porch railing, facing him. So when the man looked at him, and then blinked and stared at the doorway next to him, Mori had a good idea what he'd seen.

"Ah. I was going to say it was unusual. But you might have me trumped, there."  
Mori turned his head, to see the fox standing at his shoulder, half across the threshold, with its ears sharply pricked toward Onuma.

"He decided to live here," Mori shrugged, and then spoke to the fox. "That's Onuma. He cooks much better than I do. But he teases constantly. Don't believe everything he says."

Still caught off-balance, Onuma chuckled. "You wound me."  
Mori cracked a grin at him, and pulled apart a big strawberry, and put it on the fox's plate. "Here, I saved some for you to try."

The fox ignored the plate at first, in favor of looking between Mori and Onuma, testing the air with its nose.  
"He eats fruit?" Onuma asked quietly, watching the fox, plainly curious.

"He eats everything I've given him, almost. Doesn't like radish. Or cabbage. But that's it so far."  
"Not a native breed," Onuma observed. "Where'd you find him?"  
"There was a stranger, hunting with hounds--." A sharp look from Onuma stopped him.

"Where?"  
"They came up on the property. It was a few months ago. Did you see them somewhere?"  
"I didn't." Onuma shook his head, frowning. "No one hunts like that around here. It was outlawed a long time ago. Did you get a name?"

"I'm afraid I wasn't that polite." He nodded toward the fox, saying, "The hounds chased him to the clearing, and I let him inside, before they got here. I'm pretty sure the hunter was a foreigner. But he talked like he owned land around here."

"Did he threaten you?"

Mori shrugged. "He wanted to know if I'd seen a fox, and I said no. I don't think he believed me. But he left."  
"You didn't like him." Onuma looked intrigued by this.

"It's a cruel sport, and I was offended. And he was rude." Even now, months after the fact, the topic of that stranger got under his skin. Mori had never believed in letting resentments fester, nor in allowing others to antagonize him. But for one person, it seemed he made an exception.

"I wish I'd been there to see that," Onuma's smile was sharp for a moment. "You, facing down a hunter and a dog pack." Then he glanced to the fox, nipping a bit of strawberry off its plate and his smile softened a bit.  
Not for the first time, Mori thought he was fortunate to have a neighbor such as this. "Looks like you got an interesting friend out of the situation."

"What makes you think he's not a native breed?" Mori asked, recalling that prior comment.  
"His legs," Onuma tipped a nod toward the blaze of white from the fox's feet up to his chest. I've never seen that coloring, before."

Having finished the strawberries, the fox stepped cautiously onto the porch, sniffing its way gradually toward its water bowl. Onuma sat still and watched, as it skirted his outstretched legs, and made a tentative detour to inspect his hat.

"If we go to the river, he'll probably follow us. Is that all right?" Mori asked.

"He follows you?"  
"I've asked him not to. He does it anyway."

Onuma looked torn between the urge to laugh loudly, and his reluctance to startle the creature now sniffing at his trousers. "You asked?"  
"Well I couldn't demand. And I don't want to scare him. Anyway, if we're going to be there past dark...."

"Then I'll have an extra guest for the night?" Onuma guessed, the corner of his smile twitching.  
"If it's an imposition, we could meet in the morning."

"I certainly don't mind. It'll be novel. Anyway, I'm not sure it will still be there in the morning. I've only seen it in the evening so far."  
"Seen what?"

"Ah. Well." Onuma's eyebrows lifted, and he watched the fox approach its water bowl. "It's not so much what I've seen. But what I wonder if you'll see."

Mori waited for more detail, but when none was forthcoming, he reached for his water cup. "Sorry. I'm afraid it's too hot for riddles. Could you be more specific?"

"Not really," Onuma said honestly, with a shadow of a frown. "I would've asked Mizuko-chan, but heaven only knows where she's been lately. But I did remember you once mentioning someone being here, who I'd never seen. And I thought it might be worth asking."

"You mean a ghost?" A long while back, when he was still searching for any history of the cottage property, Mori had told Onuma about the ghost of the lady who had guided him, and essentially saved his life those first few days. 

After hearing the story, Onuma had replied that coming from anyone else, he would've thought it a delusion born out of hunger and shock, or merely fiction. But as Mori's description was corroborated by Mizuko-chan's past comments, and as Mori himself was possibly the straightest, least fanciful man he'd ever met, Onuma was willing to give him the benefit of a doubt.

Now, Onuma looked up from the fox to Mori, and shrugged. "I really can't say. But have you ever--" He paused and shook his head. "This will sound mad. Have you ever seen a kinmedai?"

"You mean the fish?" It was a variety of deep-sea snapper, as he recalled. Bright scarlet scales, and startling golden eyes. "I've seen them at a market before."

"Ever hear of one living in a river?"  
"This far from the ocean?" Mori frowned. That certainly qualified as odd.  
Onuma nodded. "Sounds impossible, I know. But there's been a school of them, down at that bend, just before the house. Three nights in a row, I've seen them."

"What makes you think a ghost is involved?"  
For a moment, Onuma glanced at the fox, which had settled on its haunches next to Mori's legs, white feet stretched out in front, watching Onuma back.

"He acts likes he's listening," Onuma smiled.  
"He listens all the time."

"I think something's feeding the kinmedai. In the evenings, it looks like they're schooling for food."

"That sounds like something worth seeing," Mori agreed. "You want to go now?"  
"God no, I think I've finally cooled down." Onuma took the wet cloth off his neck, removed his glasses and wiped his face down. "In a while, I'll take you there."


	19. Chapter 19

As it turned out, Mori met the ghost, before he got to see the kinmedai.

They'd reached the bend in the river in the early evening, when the light poured thick and golden across the landscape, and the breeze was just deciding to cool down some. Insects hovered above the yellowed grasses, caught in the slanting sunlight, while the river rippled by, quiet and lazy as a fat copper-tinted snake.

Mori followed Onuma, watching his sandals kick up puffs of dust on the trail, and the shiny lures on his hat throwing off flares and sparks of sun, while the fox trotted purposefully at his heels. He would like to have credited the fox's attentiveness to his instructions before they left; to please stay close so it didn't get lost. Though he could admit it could just as well have been due to the refreshments he'd brought along, which purposefully included plenty of the fox's favorite treats.

Either way, it had amused Onuma considerably, to look back periodically and see the fox faithfully keeping step with Mori, all the while. And in fact, it was the fox who first determined that there was something unusual after all, at the place where the river bank curved.

Walking behind Onuma, Mori didn't see the cause, but he couldn't miss the way the fox first bounded to the front position on the path, and then stopped and sat in the middle, with its ears perked and its whiskers quivering.

Onuma stopped, and Mori stopped, and at first they stood side-by-side looking curiously down at the fox.  
"Does he do this often?" Onuma asked, lifting an eyebrow at Mori.

Mori followed the direction of the fox's intent gaze, to a low overhanging tree at the mid-point of the river bend, and the elderly man resting comfortably in its shade.

"Oh," said Mori, in an undertone. "Looks like we might be intruding."

Onuma looked off toward the tree, frowning. "On what?"  
"You don't--." Mori broke off and looked more carefully at the man's clothing--plain temple robes, not unlike what he himself used to wear--and at the way the hazy summer sun seemed to gild the old man's bald pate and peaceful dozing face. 

Except that it couldn't be the sun, Mori realized, because the man was under the tree, propped against the trunk, resting in shadow.  
"Oh," Mori repeated.

"Care to elaborate on that any?" Onuma was frowning between Mori and the tree now.

"I think we should come back some other time. There's--ah--someone here, already. Sort of."  
"Is there?" said Onuma, just as the ghost under the tree smiled, and cracked his eyes open.

"No need to head off on my account, young man," he said, in such a clear voice that for an instant, Mori had to wonder if it really was a ghost he was seeing. "There's plenty of room for more, at this spot."

"Sorry to wake you," Mori answered promptly, with a quick bow that startled Onuma. "My--um--companion, here, he didn't realize...."  
"Yes, I saw him before," the ghost answered genially.

"Who did we wake?" asked Onuma, and Mori had a moment of confusion, working out who to address first.

"Sorry, I'll explain," he said generally. "There's an honored gentleman, under the tree--"

"Gentleman?" the old man chuckled. "You're too polite."  
"A monk, then?" Mori guessed.  
"Eh, that's close enough."

"--there's a holy man," Mori compromised, "Under the tree. And we just walked in on his nap, I think."  
"No need to fret about it," the old man put in, sitting up and tugging at his sleeves. "Shape I'm in nowadays, you certainly aren't depriving me of rest."

"A holy man?" asked Onuma, perplexed at Mori's one-sided conversation, and trying to catch up. "You mean a ghost?"  
"I'm not sure that's polite, when you're talking to one," Mori muttered.

Onuma looked skeptical. "You aren't pulling my leg, are you?"  
"Why would I do that?" If there was one thing Mori never joked about, it was ghosts.

"Well I'll be blessed," the ghost interjected, peering toward them with sudden interest. "Who is this you've brought along?"  
He was looking at the fox now, with the same alert curiosity the creature was regarding him with. "This is another friend of yours?" he asked Mori.

"He stays at my home," Mori said.  
"You can _talk_ to ghosts?" asked Onuma.

"How ever did you tame him?" the ghost asked.

Mori closed his eyes a moment, trying to keep his composure with two separate conversations happening at once. "I'm sorry." He looked at Onuma, first. "Can I explain later? He's talking now, and I don't want to be rude." Then to the ghost, he said, "I didn't tame him. That is--I didn't mean to. I just offered him a place to stay."

"He's asking about your fox?" said Onuma.  
"Yes. But he isn't mine." Mori felt it was important that everyone was clear on this, if nothing else.

"The fellow adopted you then, did he?" the ghost concluded, with what Mori thought might be a hint of approval. "Well, I guess it was about time."  
"About time? Did you know him already?"

The ghost watched the fox a moment, then his eyes creased in a smile, and he gave a small shrug. "I may have seen him here or there. I've been moving down this river such a long while, it's hard to know anymore." Then he looked up at Mori and Onuma. "But here, that friend of yours brought you to see the fish, eh? Why not come over and get comfortable. They'll be along shortly."

"Is that all right? I don't want to trouble your place."  
"What did he say?" asked Onuma.  
"Of course it's no trouble." The ghost patted the grass next to him, and shifted over, drawing out a long bamboo fishing rod. "That fellow has been by a few times, to see the kinmedai. I said he was welcome to sit, but I guess he's not like you, eh?"

"He's inviting us to see the kinmedai," Mori told Onuma. "He said he's seen you here before."  
"I can't tell where he is. Is it okay to go over there?" asked Onuma.  
"Since we've been invited...." Mori said. "Just stay on my right side, and you won't be in the way."

"If you're having me on, just because I said I thought something was here, it's a hell of a good acting job," said Onuma. "Just so you know."

Mori shrugged, feeling it was too hot to debate anything, or convince a skeptic. He'd given up on that years ago, anyway. He simply crossed to the spot the old man had indicated, asked his pardon, and sat. The fox followed to within a few paces, and sat again, keeping an eye on the ghost all the while. Lastly came Onuma, looking between Mori and the fox, who were both facing what could only be empty space, in his view.

"Maybe your friend will feel better, if he knows where I'm from," said the ghost, unwrapping the line from his bamboo fishing pole with aged--though still deft--hands.

"And where is that?"  
"The village temple. Have you been there?"  
"I've seen it," said Mori. "But I haven't been inside." It had seemed safer not to, to be honest.  
"Maybe that fellow has? I was called Yamato, down there."

Mori turned to Onuma, who was just making his seat in the grass. "Did you know anyone at the temple, named Yamato?"

"You mean in the village?" Onuma frowned thoughtfully. "Wasn't there a--long time ago, I think I heard. The head priest. His name was Yamato."  
Mori looked back and saw the ghost grinning broadly. "That's him," he told Onuma, who peered at him.

"This is weird. Like talking to a medium."  
"It is a rare talent you have," the old man mentioned. "Is this your line of work?"  
"No," Mori shook his head, emphatically. "I--it was discouraged. Where I grew up. It's....sorry--," he nodded to the ghost, "--it was a nuisance, to be honest. No offense."

"Not at all," the old man said. "I quite see your point. Never much went in for superstitions myself. Seems funny now, though. Considering all I've seen." At this, he leveled a long, steady look at the fox, who blinked back at him.

"If he was at the temple, shouldn't he have stayed there?" asked Onuma. Which was a good question, Mori thought.

"I had my remains scattered in this river," the ghost answered. "Every year, I find myself a little further down."  
"You were--cremated?" Mori asked, and when the ghost nodded amiably, Mori relayed the rest to Onuma.

"Why would he do that?" Onuma wanted to know.  
"Thought I should keep an eye on things awhile. There was a bit of unfinished business at the time. And some people I felt I should look out for."

While Mori passed this on, the ghost finished straightening his line, and then produced an elaborate shiny lure, and some sort of doughy paste, which he stuck on the end of the line.

Mori watched as he dropped it in. "No hook?"  
The ghost chuckled, and shook his head. "It's just to get their interest. They've kept me company so long, I wouldn't think of trying to catch them now."

Sure enough, before Mori or Onuma could formulate another question, the first of kinmedai swam into view, drawn by the ghost's fishing line.

"You were right," Mori told Onuma, as they both leaned over to watch the vivid red fish, with its startling lambent eyes. "He's feeding them off his fishing line."  
"Your friend looks like a skilled fisherman," the ghost observed. "I wonder if I could ask a favor of him?"

"I'll ask for you," Mori offered.  
"If he could abstain from throwing a hook in, or dropping traps, just for the next few nights, until I and my friends have passed. I'd look on it as a great blessing."

Mori relayed the request, and Onuma looked closely at him, and then at the water, where several of the kinmedai were now swimming determined circles, taking nips off the ghost's baited line.

"I understand," he nodded, and then grinned a little. "Of all the stories about 'the one that got away', I'd say this one takes the prize."

"Have they always been in this river?" Mori asked the ghost.

"I first saw them when I was an acolyte. Bit younger than yourself, I reckon. They came during the Obon festival, where the river runs behind the temple. You can bet it caused a stir in the village."

"Do you know where they came from?"

The old priest turned a twinkling eye to him, drawing up his bamboo line, to add more bait. "I expect you've explored the forest around these parts, a good bit, eh?"

Mori nodded.  
"Seen a few interesting places on your walks? Things that look impossible, and yet there they are?"  
"I've seen things where I've been living. And I've seen things that were strange, in the forest. But nothing impossible."

"Fair enough," the ghost tilted a shrug. "Maybe your definition of impossible is more flexible than most. At any rate." He turned his attention back to his line, lowering it down among the dozen or so fish now swimming vigorously by the bank. "It was always my thought, that these little ones came from one of those places. We're a long way from the ocean, after all."

Mori turned and repeated this for Onuma's benefit. "He thinks they came from somewhere in the forest. He says they showed up in the river during Obon, when he was an acolyte."

"At the temple?" asked Onuma, and Mori nodded.  
"They moved on at the end of the festival," the ghost provided. "They came back, during the time I was head priest. And then after my....ah, funeral, I saw them all the time."

After hearing this through Mori, Onuma looked off thoughtfully. "Unless I miss my guess....that would've been back in--." He cocked his head, doing some mental arithmetic. "I dunno, forty? Fifty years ago?"

"My goodness, that long?" the ghost chuckled agreeably. "Sometimes it seems like this is all I've ever done. Other times it seems like only this morning, I was still in the world, just like you."

"Do you know what happened with the people you were looking out for?" Mori asked. 

He'd been thinking how the ghost reminded him a good deal of old Jyuuzou-sama, who was the closest thing to both a father and a grandfather, that Mori had ever known. He'd been the wisest person in Mori's world, the person he most trusted. And of all the things he had lost along with his old life, what pained him more than anything, was knowing he would never see that old man again, or ever be able to thank him, for his care and teachings. 

But maybe, if Yamato-sama wanted help in his unfinished business, that could count as a sort of thanks, to the man Mori had grown up with. Jyuuzou-sama would approve of the help, at any rate, so surely that counted for something.

"I suppose if I've been lingering as long as your friend says, then those people must have passed on." The ghost smiled down at the water, where the kinmedai had slowed their feeding frenzy, and now swam calm circles in the eddying pool. "One of them was a youngster, I remember. He might still be around somewhere." 

He looked over to the fox, lying on its belly at Mori's knee, resting its chin on its neat white feet. "Bright pair of eyes that one had, just like your friend there. Hadn't learned to talk yet, when I saw him, but sharp as a tack all the same, you could see that."

The ghost sighed, and for just a blink, Mori caught a fleeting shadow across that weathered, kindly countenance. It looked like regret, or perhaps even sorrow, but before Mori could properly place it, the old priest's face was smooth and placid once more.

Mori was going to ask the name of the child just mentioned, with the idea that maybe he could look this person up somehow. But that glimpse of sadness from the ghost made him hesitate, thinking if it was a hurtful topic, maybe he'd best not pry into it.

And then the ghost spoke again. "You know, young man. If there's one thing I learned in all my years, one thing I was sure of, it's that friends--true friends--choose each other for a reason." He looked at Mori, Onuma, and the fox, all in turn. "I'll trust you to keep that in mind. Stay close with your friends. Look after each other. If you can do that, no matter what comes, then I believe things will turn out all right."

"Thank you," Mori nodded. "I'll remember that."

At that point, Onuma, who'd been quietly watching the water for awhile, spoke up. "Is he going now? Looks like the school is breaking up."

"It's getting on that time," the ghost agreed, pulling his line from the water. He caught the end, where the dangling silver lure spun and flashed in the dying sun. "Everything in the world moves on. Good or bad, nothing stays forever. Feels like I'm about ready to move on too." 

As he spoke, he untied the lure with unhurried care, wrapped the line back around his pole, and set it aside. Then he took up the lure again, holding it up and smiling. "This was my lucky piece, for a good long time."

"It's very fine," said Mori. And indeed, the lure was a handsome bit of silversmith work. It was a replica of a minnow, about the length of his finger, put together in hinged segments, so that when it was turned, it bent and twisted, just like a swimming fish. Looking closer, he saw it was even carved to look like a fish, with tiny scales on the hinged plates, and lines down its fins.

"May I ask a favor of you?" said the ghost.  
"Please," Mori nodded.  
"Pass this over to your fisherman friend, would you?"

Mori blinked, but held out his palm obediently, and caught the lure, when the ghost dropped it. It hit his hand with a soft clink, and next to him, Onuma jumped.

"What was that?"  
"Yamato-sama asked me to give you this." Mori handed over the lure, so Onuma could see, but for a moment all the man did was stare.

"He gave you that, just now?"  
"Please tell him he should save it," the ghost said. "And if there's ever a time when nothing but luck will help him, to tie that on his line, and drop it in."

Mori repeated that instruction, and Onuma looked up at him, and then past him, to the shadowy space under the tree. "That's quite a gift." He swallowed. "I'm not sure I can accept something so valuable."

"It's only a small token," the ghost answered. "And since I can't take it with me, it would be nice to know it could still be of use to someone else. I'm sorry to trouble him with such a little thing, but perhaps someday he'll find some worth in it."

After Mori had explained this to Onuma, Onuma regarded him seriously. "Is this really all right? I mean, in your experience...."

"I don't think it will hurt anything," Mori answered, once he saw what the man was getting at. "He seems like a very good person. I think you'd agree, if you could see him."  
"You trust him, then?" Onuma raised an eyebrow.

There was only one kind of ghost Mori had ever seen reason to distrust, and he had always known that kind on sight. But he understood Onuma's difficulty, and the risk he must perceive, accepting such a strange artifact from an unknown person he couldn't judge himself. 

"I trust him," Mori nodded.  
Onuma weighed Mori a moment longer, and then the corner of his mouth twitched minutely. "I'll hold you to that, then." He held out his hand, and Mori dropped the lure in, and then Onuma bowed low and formally.

It astonished Mori a bit, to be honest, having never seen Onuma behave in such a manner with anyone. The man bent until his forehead brushed the grass, with no compunction at all.

"I'm sure I don't deserve Yamato-sama's graciousness. But I will do my best to take care of this gift."

He sat up then, and took a closer look at the item in his hand, taking it up with his fingers to study it.

"You're an interesting group," the ghost told Mori. "It's reassuring, to know people are still respectful. That they take care of what's given to them." With a kindly smile for the fox, he added, "And that they are generous with their friends. I'm glad I could see this."

"I'm glad we could meet Yamato-sama," Mori said, and it was true. He found himself wishing he could have known this man when he was alive. That he could have visited with him, and learned from him.

"Is it all right if I ask--if he knows--when I should use this?" Onuma had pulled out his handkerchief, to polish the silver lure, dry off the last beads of water. But when Mori looked over to ask....

"Oh." The shadowed spot under the tree was empty and dark, and Mori felt a little swell of disappointment. "He's gone."

"Just like that?" Onuma sat up straighter, looking past Mori and then, registering nothing different, looking down at the river. 

But it was dark as well. The kinmedai had left, and all they could see was the gently swirling surface of the water, in the last light of the evening.

"Why do you suppose he was here?" Onuma asked.  
"It sounded like he was looking out for some people."

"But why wouldn't he stay in the village?"  
"Who knows. Maybe those people weren't in the village."

"Are ghosts always that vague?"  
"They're usually a lot more vague," Mori answered. "Most of them don't even talk."

"Huh." Onuma pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and looked around. "So that's it, then?"

At his side, the fox stood and stretched its legs, before approaching Mori's pack and giving it a few nudges with its nose. Then it sat and favored him with that familiar, expectant look, which Mori had come to take for a reminder that it was time to eat.

"I guess so," Mori smiled.


	20. Chapter 20

CH. 20

 

It was the end of summer, and for more than two weeks it had threatened rain, without a drop of water ever falling. The air sat thick and sticky, the leaves on the plants and trees hung limp, and everywhere Mori looked, the world was the same stagnant monochrome as the clouds overhead.

He would awaken to gray featureless skies, damp clothes clinging to his perspiring skin, feeling run-down and vaguely dispirited already. After a bracing wash with a pitcher of well water, he'd put on marginally less damp clothes, have some tepid tea with his rice, hang his bedding off the porch railing to air out, and by then find himself sweaty and sticky all over again.

This was the best part of the day. Once the sun rose properly, it would break through the clouds in sallow shafts, hazy and scorching, and the heat would stay trapped by the clouds, shoved around once in a great while by sluggish breezes. 

It was hard for Mori to care about weeds in the garden, when he was slimy and dripping with sweat that never dried, and the dusty soil stuck to his arms and face and neck in grimy, itchy patches. It was hard to care about the state of his rain gutters, or the fine dry dirt perpetually settling everywhere in the cottage, or the sour mildew growing in all his clothes and bedding.

It was bad enough that he had to strive through the nauseating heat, and the stickiness, and the plague of flies all day. The hacking buzz of the cicadas in the afternoon wore at his nerves, as the clouds gathered thick and dark and maddeningly still, and when the sun began to set, the mosquitoes came out in aggressive hordes.

Day after day this went on, with no relief in sight, and at night Mori lay on his bed, stripped bare and still sweating, ready to sob and beg for sleep to take him from the clutches of the stifling sticky air.

There was a perversity to weather like this. A kind of spitefulness, with the clouds lumbering darkly, doing nothing but trapping a smothering stillness to abide through the night. And as Mori went from dispirited, to desperate, to snappish, he thought it was likely a mercy he lived alone, and had no one nearby to bear the brunt of his disintegrating mood.

He knew things were getting dire, when he found himself grinding his teeth at night, over the fox's pacing. Since it had no weeds to pull or gutters to clean or a perpetual hell of laundry to wrangle, the fox was free to do the only remotely sensible thing, which was lay in the coolest part of the cottage it could find all day. After a day of heavy napping, it would arise for dinner, venture outside for a leisurely walk after sunset, and then spend the rest of the night wandering the cottage. Sniffing into corners, scrambling after trapped moths. Up and down the wooden floors, with its claws tick-ticking, aimless and repetitive, until Mori couldn't stand it any more.

It wasn't really the fox's fault, that he couldn't sleep. Somewhere, in the dim recesses of his reason, where the heat hadn't yet corrupted, Mori knew this. He couldn't sleep because it was too hot to sleep. Because the sheets stuck to his back, and he itched, and he wanted to peel his skin off but couldn't. He was too irritable to sleep. Too restless, what with thrashing his legs around, and squirming back and forth, looking for that mystical, impossible, long-lost cool patch on his bed.

It wasn't the fox's fault at all, that Mori was going insane, succumbing to the horse latitudes of late summer. But the clicking claws, back and forth, here and there, up and down the floors like a leaky tap, or a rat in the walls, or a limping staggering erratic clockwork, was Mori's misery made audible. It was the sound of his torment, grinding away at his endurance, until he couldn't help grinding his molars in counterpoint.

He tried tempting the fox with late-night snacks, which bought him an hour's peace, maybe. He tried putting the food by the rug he'd given it to sleep on, in the hopes that it might be inspired to sleep, or at least lie down for awhile, after a big plate of rice, stewed vegetables, dried beef, chopped pears, whatever Mori threw together in the still-sultry kitchen, with the crickets rasping outside and a moth banging against the glass of the kitchen lamp, and sweat trickling ceaselessly down his ribs.

He tried reasoning with it. Then cajoling. Then outright begging, at three in the morning with the mosquito bite on his foot consuming his consciousness, like it had burrowed under his flesh and crawled directly to the middle of his brain.

"Please," he moaned to the muggy darkness. "Please could you be still awhile. Just until I sleep."

The tick-tack-snicking would stop a moment, while the fox considered Mori's plight. But then invariably, it would start up again, as the fox decided it needed to tour the kitchen one more time. And then the front room. And the hall. And the bath. And Mori's room.

"What do you want? I'll give you anything." A bucket of grilled eel. A carved-oak bed with a feather mattress and silk sheets. His own right arm.

But all the fox wanted was to creep around the cottage, until an hour or so before dawn, when the dew fell, and a long sigh of cool air passed through the cottage and soothed Mori's fevered, aching brow. Then they both slept. Until the sun began to rise, bringing the heat, and Mori awoke sweating, with his jaws and temples throbbing, and rolled miserably out of bed to start it all over again.

He might not have snapped, if it weren't for the incident with the vegetable plot. And he might not have lost his composure over the vegetable plot, if he could've had just one night of decent sleep in two weeks. If he'd been less beset by fatigue, and the inescapable heat (if it was indeed worse in the village, as Onuma had suggested, Mori wondered that anyone there was left alive), and the biting insects and excruciating fox claws, Mori might have actually thought the situation through before exploding.

Sadly, and to his very great shame, he didn't.

He had been hauling buckets of well water over, to save his parched and wilting crops, when he first noticed those crops were being dug up and pilfered. A few tomatoes missing here, a couple of summer squash there. A chunk of beanstalks had been felled, there were shallow craters among the small potatoes, and he was certain there'd been more new melons on that vine than he was seeing now.

At first it surprised him, that a rabbit, or a deer, or whatever it could've been, had managed that much mischief without him or the fox noticing.

A few days later, he saw he'd lost another beanstalk. There were inroads on the parsley. More tomatoes and another squash gone. He looked around for tracks, or droppings, but the only clue--which wasn't much of one--was a lot of scattered dry soil.

It was baffling and frustrating, and while under easier circumstances, Mori might not have minded sacrificing a little produce to a hungry creature, the problem seemed much worse than that. It was a farmer's nightmare, losing their crop to pests during a drought. And on top of everything else he was powerless to change--the heat, the sleeplessness, the oppressive skies, and the fox doing its utmost every night to drive Mori to tears--the thought of losing his very livelihood was just too much for him.

He took to walking the rows several times a day, patrolling his garden like a soldier on high alert. He inspected every plant, every rock, and then stalked the perimeter of the plot, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

This obsessive policing didn't turn up any culprits, but it did appear to deter them. For four days, he was vigilant as could be, even crawling from bed in the late hours (since he wasn't sleeping, anyway), to make a careful search with his lamp in hand. And for those four days, there were no more casualties.

Satisfied that the thief had been driven off, he took the fifth day to head up to the pear orchard, where the weeds were taking over, in spite of the meager water supply. There he sweated and pulled weeds, and itched, and baked, even in the shade. The darkness of the forest behind the orchard gave a tempting illusion of coolness, but truly it was no cooler there than anywhere else, and the mosquitoes and biting flies were a damned sight worse.

Still he persevered, in an ill-tempered fashion, throwing weeds into a big basket for later disposal, bruising his knuckles on rocks and then throwing those as high and hard as he could toward the forest. He labored until he'd exhausted himself and his work clothes were soaked through. Until he was scraped and bruised up both arms, and his hands were worn raw. But it didn't make him feel any better, and he harbored a knowing dread that tired as he was, he still wouldn't sleep tonight.

He glared his resentment up at the dark clouds, massing as they had every day so far, heaved one last rock at a towering pine at the forest boundary (it missed), hefted his basket, and trudged back to the cottage.

His last task of the day--before he washed off, lit a mosquito coil, and lay on the porch with a wet rag over his face--was to water the vegetable patch. 

Or at least it would have been, had he not come around the corner of the cottage with the full bucket, and discovered the fox digging madly among the beanstalks.

He halted, stupefied, the well bucket hanging forgotten in his hand, as the shock of betrayal overcame him. This was why his food was disappearing? This was the creature that was laying all his sweat and blood and labor to waste?

Mori did not stop to reason out the picture before him. He wasn't even capable of reason, at that point. All he knew was that the fox--taking no heed of him standing right there--was tearing up the beanstalks he had planted from seeds, scattering the dry soil in a familiar pattern, tearing into the roots with those same claws that scritched and tacked across the floors, night after night after night.

After he had given it a safe home, and a bed, and all the food it could possibly want; on that thought, the sinking pit of disappointment in his gut clenched down into something hot and tight and ugly. 

At the sight of the beanstalk tottering and slumping over, and the fox still digging, the evil mood that had been festering in Mori for all those rainless days, and all those sleepless nights finally broke open, like a rotted fruit on a sweltering day. 

He snapped, and shouted at the fox.

"Stop! That isn't yours! What do you think you're doing?"

For a second, the fox twitched back, and shot him a bold look. It was panting from its exertions, dirt crusted up its forelegs, but it was not, Mori plainly saw, the least bit ashamed. 

And then to his further outrage, it gave a series of sharp yips, and leapt back into the fray, sending the dirt flying. Mori stomped toward it, seeing red. "I said stop! Get away from there!" He jerked his arm out, pointing. "Go!"

His noisy approach startled the fox, who whined and shied away, but only further into the rows, sniffing about and circling on nimble feet. And then to Mori's astonishment, it actually dismissed his presence and began to dig again, with fixated determination.

Even at the height of heat-addled fury, even with the flush of rage roaring through his veins, there was a line Mori would not cross. He would not strike out at the creature; he would not kick it, nor injure it in any way.

That line was very close, so close it was beginning to blur and he didn't trust himself to touch the fox just then. But he had to put an immediate stop to this behavior, and right at that moment the bucket in his hands seemed perfectly suited. Wholly justified.

With a last shout--"Leave it! Now!"--he heaved the whole contents of the bucket right at the fox. Six liters of cold water, as hard as he could toss it, and the fox was instantly soaked.

It staggered and fell sideways, sneezing and shaking its head violently. Then it scrambled to its feet, and gave Mori such a look of startled injury, that even with his temper still blistering hot, Mori felt a pang of regret. 

But that was nothing to what he felt when, after the fox had flinched away from him and scampered off to hide under the cottage porch, keeping its dripping head and body low to the ground, Mori looked back to the ravaged roots of his beanstalks and saw the fat groundhog peering back at him.

He barely had time to register the sleek head and shiny eyes, and the dirt-caked claws, before the groundhog flipped itself, quick as a blink and disappeared back into its hole. But he knew what he'd seen, and the enormity of his error struck him a resounding blow.

In an instant his anger vanished, and he staggered back from the rows and scattered dirt, back to the hard earth at the border of the plot, where his legs simply folded. The empty bucket banged off his knee as he slumped down, sickened at himself.

The fox had tried to help him. And he had shouted and threatened it, and doused it in cold water. He had reacted thoughtlessly, committing a grave, possibly irreparable breach of trust between them.

And then, just to prove that life could always get more unpleasant, the wind chose that moment to kick up a hard gust of dry dirt, right into Mori's eyes.

**

"I am a terrible, worthless person. And if you never forgive me, I don't blame you." Mori sat on the ground with his legs crossed, not too close to the opening under the porch. Just close enough that he could apologize profusely, for hours, to the fox hiding underneath.

"There is no excuse for the way I behaved. I should have known you wouldn't tear up the garden. You don't even like beans that much."

After the first hour, he took a break to fetch a bowl of water for the fox. And then two hours later, he thought maybe the smell of food would tempt it out. Once in a while he would hear it sigh, or shift about and scratch some, but it never came close enough that he could see it.

He knew the groundhog situation had to be dealt with, very soon. But more pressing to Mori, was the need to sit a vigil, and make as complete an act of contrition as he was capable of. Whether it salvaged anything or not.

So he sat, through the afternoon and into the evening. Most of the time in remorseful silence, but periodically re-stating his apologies, in the low, even tone he had always used with the fox, before he'd lost his mind.

"If you wanted, we could go up into the mountains. There's a lake I found last year. It's a day of walking, but it would be cool. We could rest, up there."

When evening drew near, the mosquitoes swarmed thick and hungry, and Mori temporarily left his post, heartsick, and shuffled off to light the coil. The fox always avoided the acrid smoke it produced, so he set it up on the porch, and resumed his apologies on the steps.

"I should be the one under the house. Not you. You didn't do anything wrong. If I wasn't so stupid, I would rest during the day, like you do. And I wouldn't jump to stupid conclusions, or get angry for stupid reasons."

By nightfall he had talked himself hoarse, his throat gone dry and raspy in places that water couldn't reach. But this paltry bit of suffering was hardly a scratch on the surface of what he owed. Over and over, he saw the fox's shocked, hurt look before it cowed from him. He saw the fear; the very moment when the trust grown out of time and patience was abruptly broken. And every time he saw that in his mind's eye, Mori knew there was no recompense he could ever make, which would possibly be adequate to his wrongs.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I promise I'll never shout at you again. I'll never give you any reason to hide from me." His voice broke and cracked into whispers. "Please don't suffer for what I did wrong. Please come out."

**

In the darkest hours of the night, he awoke from an uneasy doze. Sore and cramped, chilled by a gusting breeze, and half soaked from the knees down.

He'd been slumped over the porch on his side, legs still trailing down the steps, exposed to the steady, quiet shower pattering against the roof, and dripping off the porch eaves. His neck and shoulders were stiff, his back felt bruised, and the arm curled under his head was numb.

He was also starving.

With aching care, he pushed up, rubbed at his eyes and crawled up onto the porch, dragging his legs out of the rain. The darkness was thick as velvet all around, but the air--as it had not been in so many days--was cool and sweet with the scent of wet grass and watered earth.

After a few deep cleansing breaths, he rose and fumbled his way indoors, heading to the pitch-dark kitchen with careful steps, banging his hip against the counter, before locating the matches to light a small candle.

He put food into bowls, not caring what it was, put the bowls on a tray, and feeling no desire to stay indoors alone, lit a lamp in the front room, and returned to the porch.

"I have--." He had to clear his throat and try again. "I have dinner, if you want some."

Kneeling to set the tray down, he almost started at the shift in the shadows, by the far end of the porch. And then when he made out the shape in those shadows, he very nearly sobbed in relief.

"It's not much," he said, in a bare tremulous murmur. "But you're welcome to it."

Bit by bit, the fox ventured out of the shadows, and into the light pooling from the open front door. Mori stayed quiet, moving no more than necessary; setting a bowl out for the fox, slow and cautious, and taking up his own bowl in just the same way.

Leaning back against the cottage wall, he ate, and listened to the rain falling in darkness, and from time to time marked the fox's tentative progress toward him. He was nearly done eating, by the time it reached its bowl, and by that point, Mori could just make out the treetops against the cloudy gray glow of dawn.

"I'm taking the day off," he announced softly. "If you care to keep me company, I'd be very grateful."  
The fox replied with a tiny huff, and tried a taste from its bowl.

**

The rain kept up for two days, and in that time Mori napped, cooked, cleaned the drought-dust from inside the cottage, and in between did everything he could think of, to show the fox that it was welcome, and appreciated.

He dug out those heavy rugs he'd acquired a couple months back, from Arai-san, and spread them in the hall, and the portions of his bedroom and front room which weren't covered by tatami. Since one of those rugs had lately served for the fox's bed, he traded it out for his favorite blue sweater, yet again.

"My first crop of beans got me this sweater," he told the fox. "I think you should keep it, now." After a quiet walk through the cottage, perusing the new rugs, the fox returned to the sweater, folded on a cushion near the wood box. It sniffed its new bed thoroughly, and then climbed up and curled itself up into an orange-white ball of fur, tucking its nose under its tail, and settling in for a long contented nap.

Mori sat nearby and watched it sleep. He thought about forgiveness and responsibility, and the terrible mistakes a person could make, when they started taking their gifts for granted. Just because the fox had chosen to trust him again, didn't mean he could forgive himself, or ever forget what he had done. Because the fox, with its simpler, more immediate view of the world, would be apt to forget Mori's transgression, Mori himself was obliged to always remember the harsh lesson, for both of them.

**

The trap he set for the gopher was so absurdly simple, he didn't expect it to work. It consisted of a tray, buried under a few centimeters of dirt, near the gopher's hole, and above it a bowl-shaped basket propped up on a twig, with a long run of twine tied on.

Mori sacrificed some roots and a cut ripe squash for bait under the basket, and when the rain finally stopped, he ran the twine out to its full length, near a tree, where he sat and waited.

At first, the fox observed the proceedings from the porch. But as time went on, and Mori did nothing but sit with a string in his hand, it padded down the steps, and came to investigate.

"You want to help out?" Mori offered quietly. "I promise not to turn into an ogre for no reason."  
The fox circled the tree, and came to stretch out in the damp grass at Mori's side, resting its chin on his paws.  
"Or you can supervise me," Mori smiled.

The day was bright and mild, and the clear air carried the faintest foretaste of early autumn. Before much longer, it would be time to start harvesting the pears in earnest. Commissioning Fukuo-san's cart to come retrieve the bulk of the harvest; the bushels promised to Arai-san and various other merchants in the village, and then begin setting aside his winter stores.

It would be a busy time, and he could only hope this groundhog problem would be solved quickly, and that his vegetable plants could recover before the growing season ended. He'd promised Onuma his choice of the last harvest, in exchange for some river salmon, and he wanted to make good on it. No doubt the fox would love salmon.

"You know, I just realized something," he confided to the fox. "I'm fishing for a groundhog, so we can have salmon. Funny, isn't it?"

The fox swiveled an ear toward him, keeping its calm, sleepy eyes trained on the vegetable patch. "You probably think we should take a shortcut, and have the groundhog too. But salmon is better. I'll take the groundhog somewhere it won't bother us."

**

When evening was coming on, and the groundhog still hadn't shown, Mori decided to leave his post for the day. There was no use catching it, if it was too dark to take it where he'd intended--a distant meadow, not far from a forest stream, where he'd seen plenty of plants and wild berries before--and he couldn't countenance leaving it trapped in a basket overnight. That would just be cruel, and it wasn't like the destruction it had wreaked in his garden was anything personal.

So he retired to the kitchen to make dinner, and then settled on the porch, watching the fox alternately chasing fireflies, and taking breaks to sample the dumplings, rice balls, and rolled egg that Mori periodically put in its bowl.

Since the heat wave had broken, it was chilly outside after the sun went down. Not quite cold enough for another layer; just enough that Mori enjoyed the warmth of his tea, and kept his fingers wrapped around the cup, for that little extra heat.

He was almost done with the tea, and debating whether to make more, when he happened to look up and glimpse a shooting star, streaking bright across the sky, quickly followed by another.

"Oh--." He stood and walked out into the clearing, where the fox had spent the last ten minutes energetically hassling a cricket. "Hey, did you see that?"

The fox trotted over, when he knelt in the yellowed grass, and Mori said, "Look," pointing to the sky.

Sure enough, another shooting star blazed a long arc overhead, and yet another a few seconds later, leaving brief fiery trails touched with startling hints of red and yellow, like the short-lived tails of fireworks. Mori had never seen such a display up here before, and sat spellbound, eyes fixed on the sky so he wouldn't miss a thing.

The fox sat at his elbow, rustling its tail in the grass now and then, and flicking its ears, when the fleeting streaks of light caught its eye.  
It stayed close enough to brush his arm whenever it moved, and after a few minutes, Mori took a chance, and reached up to gently stroke its soft coat.

"You should make a wish," he smiled, when the fox looked curiously up at him. "That's what you do, when you see a shooting star."

For several seconds the fox regarded him, unblinking, and then another silent streak of light cut across the sky, and the fox fixed on it, turning its head to follow the long trajectory, until it winked out of sight.

Then it looked back at Mori again, and sniffed.  
"Did you make your wish?" He gave it a light scratch on the shoulders, and then up behind the ears, thinking that he himself didn't need to wish for anything. All he could want was right here.

After considering his question some, the fox turned and put one foot on his leg, in a thoughtful, deliberate fashion. When it looked back up at him, Mori nodded.  
"You can sit there. I don't mind." He leaned back some to make room, and one foot at a time, the fox stepped carefully up into his lap. It shifted and tottered around a bit, negotiating the space, and Mori kept himself perfectly still until it had settled comfortably.

Then he looked back up to stars and sighed. Feeling content, and grateful, and completely undeserving.  
"I hope your wish comes true," he said, gently resting his fingers on the warm soft fur between the fox's ears, like a benediction.


End file.
